THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
MODERN HISTORY
XI MATERIAL
PROGRESS AND
WORLD-WIDE
PROBLEMS. 1870-98
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
G.N.CLARK J.R.M.BUTLER J.P.T.BURY
THE LATE E.A. BENIANS
VOLUME XI
MATERIAL PROGRESS AND
WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
1870-1898
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE MODERN
HISTORY
VOLUME XI
MATERIAL PROGRESS AND
WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
1870-1898
EDITED BY
F. H. HINSLEY
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
LONDON • NEW YORK ' MELBOURNE
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press
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Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London nwi 2db
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© Cambridge University Press 1962
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 57-14935
isbn 0 521 04549 5 hard covers
isbn 0 521 29109 7 paperback
First published 1962
Reprinted 1967 1970
First paperback edition 1976
Printed in Great Britain
at the
University Printing House, Cambridge
(Euan Phillips, University Printer)
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
By F. H. H ins ley, Fellow of St John's College and Professor of the
History of International Relations in the University of Cambridge
General characteristics of the age pages 1-2
Economic developments 2-11
Social changes: the trend towards organisation and regulation .... 11-17
The rise of the modern state 17-25
Domestic politics: stability and conservatism; the decline of liberalism; the
beginnings of socialism 25-34
International relations; armaments; imperialism 34-48
CHAPTER 11
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
By Charles Wilson, Fellow of Jesus College and Professor oj Modern History
in the University of Cambridge
Industry, transport, capital and economic growth 49-53
World trade and international payments 53-6
Changes in the economic balance of power: the rise of new industrial states in the
United States and Germany 56-64
The adjustment of the British economy 64-70
Economic fluctuations: their effects on business organisation .... 70-5
CHAPTER 111
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
By Trevor I. Williams, Editor of * Endeavour'
Closer relations of science and technology 76-7
Progress in physics 77-S0
Progress in biology 80-3
Progress in chemistry 83-6
Developments in technology: the electrical industry 86-9
The chemical industry 89-93
The metallurgical industries 93-6
Transport; the petroleum and rubber industries 96-8
The textile industries; printing; machine tools 98-100
CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
By the late David Thomson, formerly Master of Sidney Sussex College and
Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge
Marxism and Darwinism 101-3
The influence of scientific thought and political developments .... 103-5
The applications of Darwinism 105-9
The applications of Marxism 109-12
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Sorel and Nietzsche pages 112-13
Idealism, Utilitarianism and Positivism 1 13—17
Christian theology and thought 117-19
CHAPTER V
LITERATURE
By A. K. Thorlby, Professor in Comparative Literature, School of
European Studies, University of Sussex
Symptoms of decadence 121
British writings 121-9
French literature: Symbolism, Naturalism 1 30-9
Literature in the German lands 139-45
Ibsen and Strindberg 145-9
Chekhov and Tolstoy 149-53
CHAPTER VI
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
By Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art,
Birkbeck College, University of London
The dominance of painting 154-5
Impressionism and the Impressionists 155-9
Whistler and William Morris 1 59-63
Architecture: the domestic revival in England; new trends in the United States . 163-5
The Neo-Impressionist paiinters; C6zanne, Gauguin, van Gogh .... 165-70
Art Nouveau 1 70-4
New technical possibilities in architecture 1 74-6
CHAPTER VII
EDUCATION
By the late A. Victor Murray, formerly Emeritus Professor of Education,
University of Hull, and President of Cheshimt College, Cambridge
The change from a social to an educational 61ite 177-80
University education 180-4
Education as a state concern; the movement towards secularisation . . . 184-9
Secondary education 189-93
Educational theory 193-4
The scientific movement 194-7
Tire education of women 197-200
The development of adult and technical education 200-3
CHAPTER VIII
THE ARMED FORCES
By M. E. Howard, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford
General situation 204-6
Technical developments: small arms; artillery; fortification .... 206-8
Tactics: infantry; cavalry 208-10
Strategy and mobilisation; strategic railways 210-14
Conscription 214-17
Organisation; the officer corps; their influence on policy 217-25
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Colonial wars pages 225-6
British military reforms 226-8
Naval development: shipbuilding and gunnery; torpedo-boats and submarines . 228-32
Naval policy; the influence of Mahan 232-5
New naval powers; Germany, the United States, Japan 235-40
The increase in military expenditure; the first Hague Conference . . . 240-2
CHAPTER IX
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPE
By Theodor Sciiieder, Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Modern History
in the University of Cologne
General characteristics of the period 243-5
Increase in population, urbanisation and the migration of population . . 245-8
The nation-state and the European states’ system 248-54
Forms of government and developments in domestic politics .... 254-62
The problems facing liberalism: protectionism; state interventionism; imperialism;
the relations of Church and state 262-8
The rise of socialism 268-73
CHAPTER X
THE GERMAN EMPIRE
By Werner Conze, Professor of History in the University of Heidelberg
The conflict of conservatism and national dynamism 274-5
The imperial constitution; the political parties 276-84
Social and economic developments 284-7
Bismarck’s policy: the Kulturkampf ; the attack on social democracy; social
reforms; economic and financial measures; colonial policy .... 287-93
The new emperor and the resignation of Bismarck 293-4
Developments after the fall of Bismarck 294-9
CHAPTER XI
THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
By J. Nere, Professor , Faculte des Lettres el Sciences Sociales, University of Brest
The Commune ; the conclusion of peace; the new constitution .... 300-3
The crisis of 1877 and the victory of ‘the Republicans by Birth’ . . . 303-4
Republican divisions: Opportunists and Radicals 304-7
Economic stagnation 307-9
Political consequences of economic depression; Boulangism .... 309-12
Opportunist social policies; Catholic Ralliement 312-15
The rise of socialism; the decline of the right wing; political regroupings . . 315-19
The Dreyfus affair and the triumph of the Radicals 319-21
Intellectual and artistic activity; the decline of the dominance of Paris . . 321-2
CHAPTER XII
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, TURKEY AND THE BALKANS
By W. N. Medlicott, formerly Stevenson Professor of International History ,
London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London
Two empires in decline 323-4
Conditions in the Balkans and the Ottoman empire in the 1870’s . . . 324-30
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The situation in Austria-Hungary P a g es 33°~40
Austrian advance and Muslim resistance in the Balkans after the Congress of
Berlin: Bosnia; the Pomaks; Albania 340-7
FT Armenian and Macedonian problems 347-8
The rule of ‘Abd al-Hamld in Turkey 348-51
CHAPTER XIII
RUSSIA
By J. L. H. Keep, Professor of History, University of Toronto
The emancipation of the serfs and the reforms of the 1 86o’s .... 352-9
The intellectual climate; Pan-Slavism; the Polish insurrection; the Russo-Turkish
war; the assassination of Alexander II 359-62
Reaction and repression under Alexander III. The realignment of foreign policy:
the Franco-Russian alliance 363-7
Economic and social conditions; the beginnings of industrialisation; rural back-
wardness; intellectual discontent 367-74
Adventure and disaster in the Far East; the revolution of 1905; the granting of
parliamentary institutions 374-8
The dissolution of the parliaments and the triumph of autocracy . . . 378-82
CHAPTER XIV
GREAT BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
By the late Paul Knaplund, formerly Emeritus Professor of History,
University of Wisconsin
The British world position; changes in the attitude towards overseas empire . 383-7
The political situation in Great Britain and the self-governing colonies . . 387-90
Their advance towards political democracy 390-4
Developments in communications and changes in the economic structure . . 394-402
Social and intellectual developments 402-7
Divergencies between Great Britain and the self-governing colonies; the advance
of colonial self-government 407-10
CHAPTER XV
INDIA, 1840-1905
By Percival Spear, Fellow of Selwyn College and former Lecturer
in History in the University of Cambridge
Great Britain and India 411-14
1840-58: the completion of the Company’s dominion 414-22
The Mutiny 422-4
1858-80: the effects of the Mutiny and the heyday of imperialism . . . 424-31
1880-1905: the Indian empire and the beginnings of Indian nationalism . . 431-6
CHAPTER XVI
CHINA
By C. P. FitzGerald, Emeritus Professor of Far Eastern History,
Australian National University, Canberra
The rejection of the Alcock Convention, the ‘Tientsin Massacre’ and the failure of
the Tung Chih restoration to modernise the country 437-44
The Manchu dynasty and the empress dowager 444-7
Foreign relations: the encroachments of neighbouring states to 1885 . . . 447-51
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Divisions between modernisers and reactionaries P°g es 451-2
The Sino- Japanese War, 1894-5; the ‘Battle for the Concessions’; a further
attempt at modernisation and reform 452-5
Defeat of the reform movement, 1898; the Boxer movement; siege and relief of
Peking, 1900 455-63
CHAPTER XVII
JAPAN
By W. G. Beasley, Professor of the History of the Far East,
School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
Overthrow of the shogun and the Meiji revolution 464-70
Modernisation programme of the Meiji leaders 470-5
Political and constitutional developments 475-82
Changes in Japan’s international position; the Sino-Japanese war 482-4
Economic and political consequences of the war 484-5
The Anglo-Japanese alliance 486
CHAPTER XVIII
THE UNITED STATES
By W. R. Brock, Professor of Modem History, University of Glasgow
The structure of politics; the Republican and Democratic Parties; the state legis-
latures 487-90
Congress; the Supreme Court; the presidency; the civil service .... 490-4
Reconstruction in the South; subsequent developments in the Southern states . 494-500
Agrarian radicalism in the Mid-West 500-4
Social assumptions and economic problems : laissez-faire and regulation ; capital
and labour; the city and the immigrant 504-12
Nationalism and conservatism 512-15
CHAPTER XIX
THE STATES OF LATIN AMERICA
By Charles C. Griffin, Emeritus Professor of History, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York
Rapid development of their connections with the outside world . . . . 516-19
Their economic development 519-25
Changes in their political life 525-30
The beginnings of protest against oligarchical dictatorships .... 530-2
Revolution in Cuba 532-3
Their wars and rivalries 533-6
Intellectual and cultural developments 536-41
CHAPTER xx
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
By A. J. P. Taylor, Fellow of Magdalen College and former Lecturer in
International History in the University of Oxford
The European balance of power ... 542-4
The Eastern Question and the Congress of Berlin 544-5°
The decline of the Concert of Europe; the beginning of the alliance systems . 550-4
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The British occupation of Egypt; British isolation; Bismarck’s diplomacy . pages 554-9
The Franco-Russian alliance ; stalemate in a changed balance in Europe, increased
rivalry beyond 559-63
The spread of European rivalry to Africa and the Far East .... 563-5
The Boer war and the Anglo- Japanese alliance; the end of the deadlock in Europe 565-6
CHAPTER XXI
RIVALRIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, THE
MIDDLE EAST AND EGYPT
By A. P. Thornton, Professor of History , University of Toronto
The interests and policies of the European powers
The Eastern Question: the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8 and the British occupa-
tion of Cyprus
The local rulers; the problem facing the European powers
Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia: the Afghan war; Penjdeh; the struggle in
Persia
The British occupation of Egypt; its consequences for the relations between the
powers
Germany’s incursion into the Middle East: Turkish and Persian railway systems
Diversion of attention from the Middle East to Africa, the Far East and Europe
CHAPTER XXII
THE PARTITION OF AFRICA
By R. E. Robinson, Fellow of Balliol College and Beit Professor of the History of
the British Commonwealth, University of Oxford and J. Gallagher,
Fellow of Trinity College and Vere Harmsworth Professor
of Imperial and Nava! History, University of Cambridge
The nature of imperialism in Africa 593-5
The situation in North Africa: the occupation of Tunis and Egypt . 595-602
The partition of Tropical Africa: West Africa, 1883-91 602-11
The partition of Tropical Africa: East Africa, 1883-91 . 611-17
Types of African Society 617-20
France in West Africa, 1891-6 620-2
Egypt and the struggle for the Nile, 1891-8 622-9
Anglo-French rivalry in West Africa, 1896-1900 629-33
The struggle in Southern Africa, 1870-1900 633-9
Imperialism and African nationalism 639-40
CHAPTER XXIII
EXPANSION IN THE PACIFIC AND THE
SCRAMBLE FOR CHINA
By F. C. Langdon, Professor of Economics and Political Science,
University of British Columbia
Disorder and conflict in the Pacific Islands: Fiji and Samoa .... 641-4
China’s border areas ; expansion by Japan 644-7
Great Britain, Germany and the United States in the Pacific: New Guinea, Samoa,
Hawaii 647-50
France in Indo-China 650-2
Rivalries in Korea; the Sino- Japanese war 652-8
The scramble by the European powers for concessions in China .... 658-62
American expansion in the Pacific: the occupation of the Philippines; Samoa . 662-3
The struggle in China : the Manchurian crisis, the Anglo-Japanese alliance . . 663-7
x
567-71
57i-3
573^5
575-83
583-90
591-2
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CHAPTER XXIV
THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
By A. E. Campbell, Professor of American History,
University of Birmingham
The American outlook in foreign affairs; the Pacific; relations with Latin
America pages 668-71
Competition with Great Britain in the 1890’s: the Venezuela dispute; the Alaskan
boundary; the Panama Canal 671-9
The Spanish-American war and the occupation of the Philippines . . . 679-84
The United States and the struggle in China 684-8
Non-diplomatic contacts with the Old World; trade; immigration . . 688-92
The rise of the United States as a great power 692-3
Index 695
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
T o ask what were the important developments of the last thirty years
of the nineteenth century is to be reminded of the force of con-
tinuity in men’s affairs and of the rarity of abrupt change. The
growth of material power and wealth; of industrialism and urbanisation;
of technology and scientific knowledge; of transport, communications
and trade; of population and of the movement of population; of central-
ised government; of democracy; of literacy and education; of public
opinion and the press — these prominent developments of the age had been
almost as prominent in the generation, if not in the whole century, which
ended in 1870; and the same developments are no less central to an under-
standing of the years which stretch from the beginning of the twentieth
century to the present day. If we call this period simply the age of
material improvement or of industrial development or of democratic pro-
gress we have not said much of value about it. Nor does it help towards
sharper definition to reflect upon another characteristic of the time: that
these continuing massive developments, or most of them, occurred only in
European society and its off-shoots in North America and the other areas
of white settlement. This restriction and the consequent predominance of
European power and civilisation in the world had existed long before
1870. They were to last beyond 1900, when European monopoly of all this
progress was still scarcely touched by changes in Japan, and the discrep-
ancy between the European and less advanced societies had become more
acute than it had ever been. In studying this other feature of the time, as
in analysing the changes that took place in the more developed areas, the
first problem is to allot the period its proper place in a much longer span
during which the same forces and relationships were always dominant but
never at rest.
A second problem arises. The contradictions between some of the main
characteristics of this period are at first sight startling. These were years of
enormous material expansion and of economic depression; of vast strides
towards the closer integration of the world’s economy and yet of sharp
reaction against the economics of free trade; of improved living standards
but also of poverty and social degradation; of rapid social change but of
stagnation in the internal politics of states; of the spread of democracy
and yet of the strengthening of government and even of absolutism; of
international peace but of armed peace — while intellectually and culturally
they produced both work which proclaimed the triumph of enlighten-
ment and work which touched the depths of disillusionment and despair,
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
But contradictions or apparent contradictions between the developments
of any age loom large when it is studied as a whole — until closer study
succeeds in explaining or resolving them. The explanation or the resolu-
tion of these contradictions is another route to an understanding of the
character of the age.
Its character from the economic and material points of view is an-
nounced by two facts. It witnessed to a greater extent than any earlier
generation the geographical spread of modern industry beyond its
countries of origin and the application to industry and agriculture of
science and technology; and as a result there was an increase in total
industrial and agricultural production on a greater scale — if not at a
greater rate — than the world had ever previously experienced. This is not
difficult to explain. It is not a feature which distinguishes the age from some
others : the increase and spread of material production and the growth of
science and technology have been continuous and virtually autonomous
processes throughout modern times. Much more distinctive is the second
fact. Because material output jumped farther and more sharply in advance
of demand than ever before, these years were also years of declining prices,
profits and investment yields to an extent that has earned for them the
title of ‘The Great Depression’.
Only the economies of Great Britain and Belgium could be described as
highly industrialised in 1870; even in Great Britain in that year the com-
bined labour force in mining, quarrying, the metal industries, engineering
and shipbuilding still did not equal the number of textile and clothing
workers or of agricultural labourers or of domestic servants. In the next
thirty years industry came to predominate in the economies of the United
States and of most countries in western Europe, and developed to a lesser
degree in the rest of Europe and in Japan. From the beginning of the
period entirely new basic industries were introduced — the electrical and
the chemical — in the more industrialised countries. They were the first
industries to originate wholly in scientific discovery. Their origin, unprece-
dented speed of development and immediate effect in increasing and
diversifying industrial production — particularly that of electricity, which
provided an entirely new source of heat, light and power — are only the
most dramatic illustrations of the extent to which, as never before,
industry, technology and science were becoming interlocked. The majority
of earlier inventions had been the work of practising craftsmen with only
a modest knowledge of scientific theory. Now a whole century of slow pro-
gress and restatement in pure science — particularly in thermodynamics,
electro-magnetism, chemistry and geology — began to meet up with rapid
development in practical mechanical engineering — and particularly in the
production of machine-tools — and in industrial methods. In a process of
interaction between all three which became so cumulative that it is diffi-
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INTRODUCTION
cult to distinguish cause from effect, not only were new industries de-
veloped and new sources of power provided — the internal combustion
engine, stemming from progress in thermodynamics theory, being only
less important than electricity. Innumerable existing industries — mining
and road-building, steel, agriculture, petroleum, rubber, concrete are but
a few examples — were transformed and expanded. Innumerable new
products — the modern bicycle, the telephone, the typewriter, linoleum, the
pneumatic tyre, cheap paper, artificial silk, aluminium, ready-made clothing
and shoes — were manufactured and marketed for the first time. It was in
this period that mechanisation first became characteristic of industry in
general, although traditional, empirical methods were nowhere entirely
ousted and in some industries remained dominant, and that the range of
industrial products assumed something like its present extent.
The consequent increase in total output was enormous. Between 1870
and 1900 world industrial production increased nearly four times. 1
World production of pig-iron more than tripled — from 12^ to over 37
million tons. It had increased just under threefold — from about 1,600,000
tons to 4,470,000 tons — between 1830 and 1850 and just under threefold —
from 4,470,000 tons to 12^ million tons — between 1850 and 1870. The rate
of increase between 1870 and 1900 was not as great as between 1830
and 1850 or 1850 and 1870, but the amount of the increase greatly exceeded
that of the previous forty years. World production of coal increased by three
and a half times— from about 220 million to nearly 800 million tons. It
had increased about sevenfold — from 30 to 220 million tons— between
1830 and 1870, at the rate of 60-70 per cent per decade. Thus, again, this
earlier rate of increase was not maintained between 1870 and 1900, but
the amount of the increase greatly exceeded that of earlier years. The num-
ber of cotton spindles almost doubled in Europe as a whole and in the
United States, and more than doubled in Germany, Italy and Russia.
If the rate of increase of production declined as industrialisation spread to
new areas, it declined most markedly in those countries where industrial-
isation had had an earlier start. British industrial production about
doubled, so that the British share in the world total dropped from about
one-third in 1870 to about one-fifth in 1900; it was exceeded by that of the
United States in the early 1880’s, by Germany’s in the 1900’s. The output
of the French metallurgical industries scarcely increased at all between
1871 and 1895, while in Germany it increased threefold and in the United
States fourfold. But in the older areas, and particularly in Great Britain, the
process by which the industrial base and society itself were becoming more
complex and diversified did much to offset this relative fall. There was an
immense expansion of output in newer directions, in the light industries
1 It must be emphasised that almost all quantitative estimates for this period are approxi-
mations, subject to a good margin of error, because of the inadequacy or absence of many
of the statistics. This should be remembered in connection with all figures quoted.
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
made possible by the advance of technology and in the production of the
consumer goods — soap, chocolate, beef-extract, cheap newspapers — made
possible by cheaper distribution methods and rising standards of living,
j ust as there was a great increase in the numbers employed in the distributive,
clerical and professional occupations in these most advanced societies.
Aggregate wealth mounted with total production. Capital invest-
ment in Great Britain did not increase at the same rate as in the thirty
years before 1873, but it still doubled in the next twenty-five years,
as it did in France, and it increased by three times in Germany and by
more than that in the United States. Real income per head in Great
Britain, which had risen by about 30 per cent over the whole period from
1851 to 1878, increased at the rate of between 17 and 25 per cent per
decade between 1870 and 1900 — a rate that had never previously been
sustained for an appreciable period and that was not to be sustained in
subsequent years— despite the continued increase in total population. In
other industrialising countries, in proportion as heavy investment was
still being required in the basic equipment of an industrial society — in
railways, docks and towns— the national income grew at a slower rate,
but still at a faster rate and to a much greater extent than they had ever
before experienced.
This increase in production and wealth was not confined to industry
and to the industrialised and industrialising nations. European invest-
ments abroad, which even before 1870 had enabled some overseas areas
to produce food and raw materials for a world market, continued to
grow. British overseas investments, like British domestic investment, did
not maintain their earlier rate of increase, but they increased nearly three-
fold in this period, while in some areas their increase was much greater.
In Argentina, for example, they increased ten times between 1870 and
1900. Those of France more than doubled in total amount; Germany’s
rose from nothing to being one-third of Great Britain’s. These rates of
increase represented a huge increase in the amount of capital exported.
British overseas capital, which had totalled about £200 millions in 1855
and £1050 millions in 1875, amounted to about £1530 millions in 1885,
to about £2400 millions in 1900 and to nearly £2700 millions in 1907. Nor
was it capital alone that Europe exported.
There was a considerable increase in the movement of European popula-
tion across the oceans and a vast improvement in Europe’s knowledge of
the geography and geology of the outside world. Of the 55 million Euro-
peans who emigrated between 1821 and 1 924, 2 1 million emigrated between
1870 and 1900, of whom half went to the United States and half to other
areas — to Latin America, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zea-
land. This figure does not take into account the fact that with the improve-
ment of communications perhaps as many as one-third of the emigrants
now returned to Europe, and an increasing proportion were people who
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INTRODUCTION
made a regular practice of temporary and seasonal migration. The exodus
was still greater than it had ever been. It was in the same thirty years that
most of the undeveloped agricultural areas of the world were opened up
and that, with the increase of geological knowledge, though not all were yet
exploited, most of the world’s great mineral-bearing districts were dis-
covered. Many of the emigrants, particularly among those from Great
Britain, were skilled craftsmen who played a significant part in the estab-
lishment and spread of industry in their countries of reception. But the
opening up of those countries as primary suppliers was the chief effect of
this movement, of the transfer of capital that accompanied it and of the
simultaneous leap forward in knowledge and in long-distance transport
and communications that did so much to stimulate the emigration and
the capital export. In no period of history has the world come into
possession so quickly of so huge an increase in its natural wealth. And in
an age that was inaugurated in 1869 by the opening of the Suez Canal
and of the first trans-continental railway in America, as the railway was
improved in efficiency and pushed beyond Europe, as world shipping
increased from 16 million net tons in 1870 to 30 million net tons in 1900,
as the carrying capacity of the world’s shipping increased by four times in
the same period— the world’s steam tonnage came to equal that of sail by
the mid- 1 890’s and the carrying service of a steamship was equal to that of
a sailing vessel of four times its net tonnage — previously peripheral areas
began to produce and export on a scale hitherto unimagined, and an ever-
increasing flow of food and raw materials reached the old world from
new lands. Until the early 1900’s the supply was dominated, except in
wool, by the United States, but other lands — Australia and New Zealand,
South Africa, Argentina and other Latin- American states — were beginning
to export on a large scale by the end of the century. At first the increase
was mainly in grain, wool and cured foods. Dakota and Argentina, un-
important for wheat in 1880, were exporting 62 and 8 million bushels
respectively by 1887. Argentina exported 100 million bushels of wheat
and maize in 1897. By 1890, with the development of mining and of the
refrigerated ship — the first refrigerated ship left Argentina with mutton
in 1877; the first ship-load of New Zealand mutton reached England in
1882 — it was involving oil, minerals, meat and dairy products, tropical and
sub-tropical fruits, everything but the most bulky and perishable of goods.
Since there was also an expanding demand for European manufactures
in these newer lands, where there was a rapid increase in the area of culti-
vation and in the application of machinery to mining and farming as well
as in population, the extra-European areas played a large part, as im-
porters as well as exporters, in stimulating the industrialisation of the
more advanced countries. Their development provided new markets both
for old products and for newer types of manufactures as well as increasing
the wealth and the range of products, and thus the demand for goods,
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
within the older societies themselves. They also took a greater share than
ever before in the flow of world trade. The foreign trade of Argentina
tripled between 1870 and 1900, the trade between India and Europe more
than doubled. Foreign trade, an unimportant element in the economy of
many nations in i860, became indispensable to most nations between
1870 and 1900 as the division of labour between manufacturing countries
and primary producers was intensified. This development was especially
marked as between the economies of north-west Europe and the United
States. But the closer economic integration of a single Atlantic commun-
ity was not the sole result. There were new specialist developments within
Europe itself, notably the expansion of Scandinavian timber and iron pro-
duction and export. The ring of distant primary producers was widened
from North America, Roumania and Russia to tropical and sub-tropical
lands and, beyond them, to Australasia and South Africa. Areas and lines
of commerce that had previously been self-contained dissolved into a
single economy on a world scale. Improvements in banking and financial
services and (with the extension of cables and the introduction, at the end
of the period, of wireless) in communications were simultaneously knit-
ting the world the more closely together by creating a single multilateral
system of international payments. A world market, governed by world
prices, emerged for the first time. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century more of the world was more closely interlocked, economically
and financially, than at any time before — and perhaps since.
It seems at first sight surprising that in these circumstances— when the
spread and diversification of industry and agriculture were increasing the
wealth and production of the world and when huge improvements in
transport, communications and finance were combining to integrate the
world’s economy — the rate of increase in the total flow of world trade was
not greater than it was. This increased by a larger amount than in any
previous generation. In the thirty years after the mid- 1870’s its gold value
probably more than doubled, from about £2800 millions to £5000 millions
per annum, and, in view of the fall in prices, its volume may have trebled.
Since prices and the amount of trade both rose considerably between 1896
and the mid- 1900’s, the increase both in value and in volume was less than
this over-all figure would suggest, however, between 1873 and 1896, when
its value probably rose from about £2800 to £3900 millions and its volume
about doubled; and this, though still considerable, was, by value, a
smaller increase than that achieved in half the number of years between
i860 and 1872 and, measured by value or by volume, a lower rate of
growth than at any time since the 1820’s. 1 But this reduced rate of
1 A. H. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Harvard, 1958), pp. 189 ff.,
gives the latest estimates, which can only be approximate. According to these, the increase
in value between 1873 and 1896 was by one-third compared with increases of 80 per cent
between 1850 and i860 and of almost 100 per cent between i860 and 1872. These earlier
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increase was a corollary of the spread and improvement of industry and
agriculture. These processes took place so rapidly that the world’s in-
dustrial and agricultural production temporarily mounted in excess of
the increase in world demand. After the mid- 1890’s world trade again
increased at the rapid rate that had been experienced before the mid-
1 870’s — its value doubled between 1898 and 1913 — but between these
dates it was this excess which brought down prices; and lowered prices
largely account for the lowered rate of increase in the value of world
trade. It was this which also lowered the rate of increase in the volume of
trade. Wherever industry spread and industrial production increased in
these circumstances, the effect was to supply home markets which had
hitherto been supplied from abroad, and thus to increase commercial
activity within nations but to reduce the rate of increase in the volume of
trade between industrialised nations. Trade between Great Britain and
European countries, as a proportion of their total foreign trade, steadily
declined after 1880, as did that between Great Britain and the United
States after 1890. On account of the same circumstances trade between
the industrialised and the new agricultural areas was also hampered by a
decisive trend towards national protection for both agriculture and
industry.
The effect of the general situation, and of the resort to tariffs in particu-
lar, must not be exaggerated. World trade, though it mounted at a slower
rate between the mid- 1870’s and the mid- 1890’s than before or after, still
expanded by an impressive absolute amount. In France alone among the
main trading countries were exports smaller in 1895 than in 1875 or 1883.
The expansion of production was forcing total trade upwards to a greater
extent than it was limiting its rate of increase, and the reversion to pro-
tectionism was more than offset by the constantly widening opportunities
in international trade. This reversion, moreover, was neither so sharp nor
so extensive as is sometimes assumed. Perhaps because it is the natural
disposition of nations and businessmen to be protectionist, the earlier
trend towards the liberalisation of trade had been slow, and liberalisation
was far from complete in the 1870’s when the protectionist trend was
resumed. The removal of obstacles to international trade had depended
on many things, including the ability of countries to afford the loss of
customs revenue or to find a substitute at a time when, while other sources
of revenue were developing, state expenditure was also mounting. In
Europe, too, economic liberalisation and free trade had been associated
periods had been periods of rising prices ; but if trade is measured by volume it increased by
nearly 300 per cent (7 per cent per annum) between 1800 and 1840 when prices were falling,
and increased by nearly 400 per cent (over 13 per cent per annum) between 1840 and r872
when prices were rising, compared with the 100 per cent (4 per cent per annum) increase
between 1873 and 1896, when prices were falling. But between 1898 and 1913 world trade
again increased at something like the earlier rate, doubling in value from £3900 to £8360
millions per annum.
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with political liberalism, which was anathema to privileged governing
classes. There had been a trend towards lower tariffs — in the German
Zollverein, in the United States and in France, for example — but only
after 1850. Although there had been a discernible tendency to lower
import duties, and few cases of tariff increases, after that year, it was only
in very rare instances that duties had been removed completely by the
i870’s. Even in Great Britain, where the reduction and removal of duties
had begun in the 1820’s, there were still seventeen dutiable imports in
1870. After the i87o’s, on the other hand, some countries resisted the
resort to increased tariffs.
Nevertheless, these countries were exceptional and they had special
reasons for clinging to free trade. In Great Britain and Belgium industrial
and commercial interests outweighed agrarian interests in economic and
political importance, and industry was so far advanced that protectionism
would have reduced rather than stimulated the foreign and domestic
demand on it. In Holland, as in Great Britain and Belgium, commerce
was too dominant to make protectionism practicable. Denmark’s depen-
dence on agricultural exports necessitated free trade and forced her,
instead, to escape the new agricultural competition by specialised farming.
In Turkey tariffs could be raised only with the consent of the great
powers. Their policy cannot alter the fact that the same developments
which were producing an enormous increase in the world’s total production
and integrating its economy at one level were contributing to a departure
from free trade at another, that the age was the age of the tariff as well
as of an increasingly integrated world economy— and so much so, that
the world economy could not have developed as it did if the exceptional
countries, and especially Great Britain, the largest international trader,
had not kept their doors open to the imports of all nations at a time
when most nations were adopting increasingly protectionist policies.
This was because the changing over-all relationship between supply and
demand was not only limiting the rate of increase in total trade but was
also taking place, at a time when distances were being slashed, within a
changing geographical framework. It was creating the problem of re-
adjusting supply and demand between the individual nations, which can-
not quickly adopt specialised economies or easily operate an international
division of labour. It is tempting to assume that protectionism had a
special political attraction for the generation that had issued from the wars
of the i85o’s and 1860’s and now maintained an armed peace. In fact the
decision to adopt increased tariffs bore little direct relation to political
situation or political goal. While Great Britain clung to free trade in spite
of being deeply involved in international politics, American tariffs were
higher than any in Europe in spite of the aloofness of the United States
from world politics. They rose from 47 per cent in 1 869 to 49 5 per cent in
1890 and (after some relaxation) to 57 per cent in 1897. Canada and the
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other British Dominions, more peripheral politically even than the
United States, reared enormous tariff walls. Even in Latin America
tariffs were resorted to in the defence of infant industries if, as in Chile,
industrial interests became strong enough to demand them. In Europe
tariff wars did not always coincide with political rivalries. Germany’s
barriers against foreign grain were a source of serious complaint in Russia
after 1879, when Bismarck was anxious to maintain Russo-German
friendship. On the plane of intellectual rationalisation, moreover, poli-
tical rivalries were rarely urged in defence of protectionism. Men,
responding to a changed economic situation, made much the same claim
for it, with as much justification or as little, as they had made in the 1 85o’s
and i86o’s for laissez-faire : it would benefit all mankind by enabling some
nations to avoid exploitation by others, thus ensuring that all the nations
would reach the happy goal of international harmony and material well-
being. When this changed situation is considered it becomes difficult to
avoid the view that the nations would have reverted to tariffs if they had
been wrapped in perfect peace— even as the earlier wars had coincided
with a trend towards free trade — and that, except when special economic
circumstances countervailed, as they did in the exceptional countries, it
was natural enough that men should assume more readily than before
that they could not prosper without national protection.
What the problem was emerges especially clearly in connection with
agricultural produce. Agricultural prosperity had previously accompanied
a country’s industrial development almost automatically, since mounting
demand had been supplied locally. British agriculture had boomed be-
tween the 1840’s and the 1870’s despite the repeal of the Corn Laws.
From the middle of the 1870’s, world production, of grains in par-
ticular, surged upwards in excess of population growth, and certainly
too rapidly for easy absorption in the world’s markets at satisfactory
prices, as a result of the intensification of agriculture in other parts of the
world; and the cheap transport of the produce over long distances, at costs
that were no higher between continents than they had once been between
provinces, threatened the whole of Europe with agrarian crisis. There was
accordingly some protection for agriculture in the earliest European tariff
increases of the 1870’s, and most of the further increases after 1885 were
carried out in the interests of agriculture. Even so, the price of wheat in
Europe fell by a half between 1871 and 1895. The object was to preserve
a balance in the economy of the kind which Great Britain was losing as a
result of her adherence to free trade, but which it was more important to
preserve where society, despite industrialisation, was still more agrarian
than in Great Britain. Industry also received protection, and here the
motives included both the need for safeguards against the consequence of
rapid industrialisation elsewhere and the wish to further industrialisation
at home. The first modest steps in this direction were taken by countries
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where industry, though it had made a beginning, was still in its infancy —
by the United States in 1875, Russia in 1876, Spain in 1877, Italy in 1878.
They were taken when depression conditions in industry, which had set in
in 1873, were being aggravated by the dumping of manufactures by more
industrialised nations. Subsequent tariff increases for the protection of
industry, beginning with the great German tariff of 1879, which applied to
industry and to agriculture, still derived from the circumstance that, while
industrialisation was spreading, it continued to stand at different levels of
development and efficiency as between different industries in different
countries. But wherever they were adopted they stimulated industrialisa-
tion as well as protecting existing industry. They thus contributed to the
continuation of those depression conditions which, in industry as in agri-
culture, arose from the spread and intensification of production beyond
the immediate power of world demand to absorb the results.
Depression conditions were limited, however, to the field of prices,
profits and investment yields. The period was not one of economic depres-
sion as a whole. By the tests of production, consumption and income, as
has already been shown, as opposed to those of prices and profits, it was
one of expansion and boom. The fall in prices, moreover, was not wholly
a symptom of depression. After rising steadily during the previous genera-
tion, prices moved downwards till the early 1890’s, when they were
generally 40 per cent lower than in 1873, and did not pick up again till
1896. But this decline was due as much to the great reduction in transport
costs, the improvement in technology and the increased scale of produc-
tion as it was to the excess of production over demand. It was improved
methods and increased production, combined with the revolution in trans-
port, that forced down the price of food and raw materials. Improved
methods and increased production, combined with the fall in raw material
costs, are what — to take but one example from industry — reduced the
European price of steel rails by 60 per cent between 1872 and 1881 and
made it possible to sell American steel rails in 1 898 at little more than one-
tenth of what they had cost in 1 875. In the same way the price of iron had
fallen in the previous generation, against the general trend, from £10 per
ton in 1825 to £3 per ton in 1866. What had then been exceptional now
became the general, though not the universal, trend. And because all these
factors were involved, falling prices were not necessarily accompanied by
falling profit margins. The advantages of reduced transport costs and raw
material prices, of improved methods, of wider markets and increased
production, could lead to the opposite result.
Yet profits in general fell as well as prices, and to almost the same
extent. Their decline, the central feature of the Great Depression, was due
to two causes. It was brought about partly by the element of temporary
over-production that was also, though again only partly, the cause of the
fall in prices. It followed chiefly from the fact that the advantages of the
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INTRODUCTION
time were being exploited by an increasing number of competing firms in
every market and in every field. The explanation of the reversion to
tariffs at a time of widening and increasing exchange is that a growing
number of nations took part increasingly in the total exchange; the key
to the Great Depression is that, while total production and total profits
mounted, the profits of the individual enterprise — though there were
exceptions, the consequence of rapid adaptation and initiative in exploit-
ing new fields — in general declined with the proliferation of undertakings
and the growth of competition. The world economy as a whole flourished ;
national economies as a whole flourished, to the extent that they partici-
pated in and adjusted to the changing world economy; but times were
harder for the rapidly increasing number of individual firms.
The combination of material expansion and growing competition that
was producing on the international scale both a more integrated world
economy and increased protectionism, both increased output and falling
profits, also underlay the changes that were taking place within the more
advanced societies. These reflected a pronounced trend from laissez-faire :
towards combination in economic enterprise, towards collective self-help
among wage-earners, towards state regulation in the economic and social
fields. Like the movement towards greater material output and like the
advance in technology and production methods, processes with which it is
intimately connected, the drift towards greater organisation among men,
as specialised groups and as total communities, has been virtually con-
tinuous and has continually increased in momentum throughout modern
times. But it was in the generation after 1870, when the drift was so much
accelerated by the interaction of the greater problems and the greater
opportunities with which societies were confronted, that those forms and
attitudes first took clear shape which exist today.
The problems were not merely those created by the growth of material
production and economic competition. Although these asserted them-
selves within the more advanced societies as well as between nations, they
were also arising in increasingly complex and rapidly changing social
structures in consequence of the march of industrialisation and urbanisa-
tion among expanding populations. Population was growing faster in
these countries than at any previous time. Even after allowing for emi-
gration, which drew off 40 per cent of the natural increase, Europe’s
population increased by over 30 per cent and by 100 millions — from 300
to 400 millions — between 1870 and 1900 compared with an increase of
30 millions — of 11 per cent— between 1850 and 1870. Helped by immi-
gration the population of Europe’s overseas frontier in North and South
America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa rose at an even faster
rate — and by 60 millions — in the same period. In the most industrialised
of these areas the rush to the towns now took place on such a scale that
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the increase in urban and suburban population equalled this huge increase
in total population. In the remainder— in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, in
European Russia, Austria and Australasia — the same development still
produced large if isolated urban growths, as it did beyond these areas, in
India and Japan, where population was also increasing fast but where
there was even less industrialisation. 1 Germany, with eight towns of over
100,000 people in 1870, had forty-one in 1900. Except in France — where
the population increase was exceptionally low, but where nearly half the
total increase in these years, about 800,000 people, accrued to Paris —
urbanisation on a similar scale took place throughout western Europe and
in the United States. Even in European Russia the number of such towns
had risen from six to seventeen by 1900. By that date one-third of the
population of the United States lived in manufacturing centres, one-tenth
of that of England and Wales had concentrated in London, the percentage
of Germans living in towns had risen from 36 in 1 870 to 54, and Berlin,
Vienna, St Petersburg, Moscow, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Osaka and Calcutta had joined
London and Paris as cities with more than a million inhabitants. Nor was
it simply the case that population was rapidly increasing and that more
and more people were being drawn into industry and the urban areas.
The organisation of industry and the conditions of work in industry
were becoming more complex. The interrelationship between industry and
the total economy, between the urban areas and the society in which they
existed, was being transformed. The increased physical difficulties involved
in organising industrial production and in disposing of its products, the
increasingly complex tasks that must be performed if the industrial con-
glomerations were to fulfil their role in society as a whole — these jostled
with social problems thrown up by the growth of large areas of dense
population as well as with the economic problems created by growing
competition in industry.
Industrial and other forms of enterprise necessarily responded to these
changes. Most of the industrial, commercial and financial expansion of
earlier generations had been undertaken in simpler technical and social
conditions by the family firm or the small partnership, with unlimited
liability for all partners and unlimited freedom for masterful men. The
extent of the transition that now took place in business organisation and
methods from the small unit and the principle of unlimited liability to the
large joint-stock enterprise is easily exaggerated. The joint-stock company
1 The population increase was not world-wide. It took place almost as fast in India
and Russia as in more industrialised societies, and so much in advance of other develop-
ments there as to produce famine or famine conditions. But in other areas material
conditions remained so much worse that population was stationary (as it probably was
in Africa) or even declined (as in China, where it is estimated that the population in the
lower Yangtse valley was higher in 1850 than in 1950 and that in the 1870's alone the
North China famine killed more than 15 millions).
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INTRODUCTION
had proved increasingly necessary since the 1 840’s in the management of
public utilities — canals, railways, water and gas supply, banking and
docks — and the principles of private incorporation and limited liability
had been firmly established in the i85o’s. The family business and the
small firm still predominated in every country long after 1900: in Ger-
many 93 per cent of industrial enterprise was still conducted by individual
proprietors at the beginning of the twentieth century, when one-third of
the industrial workers were still employed in establishments employing
not more than five people; in Great Britain in 1914 four-fifths of even the
62,762 active joint-stock companies were private companies, family firms
and private partnerships in a new guise. Then again, although limited
liability was ultimately to be a new means of raising capital for industry
through the stock exchange, it was not until after 1 890 that it began to be
used for this purpose to any great extent. Increasingly after 1870, how-
ever, the small firm was replaced by the large limited liability company,
which now for the first time entered the manufacturing, commercial and
financial fields.
By 1900 a dual economy had appeared in the industrialised countries—
a sharp contrast between a large traditional sector hardly touched by
organisational change and a limited but economically preponderant
modern sector comprising the major industries and a large part of
the commercial and financial enterprise, in which the typical unit was
a limited liability undertaking on a considerable scale. This had re-
sulted from the growth in the size and capital of larger firms and from
the amalgamation of firms. Those processes had been supplemented by
the formation of associations of firms for agreements on prices, the
creation of trusts in the pursuit of monopolies — the earliest was Rocke-
feller’s Standard Oil (1882) — and the establishment of cartels by which
firms in one industry sought to control sections of the associated and sub-
sidiary industries on which they depended. These developments took place
on an international scale as well as within countries. In 1883 a market-
sharing agreement was reached between the steel companies of Great
Britain, Germany and Belgium. It was short-lived, but was followed by
many similar arrangements between industrialists and bankers for ration-
ing producers, fixing shipping freights, rebates and fares. Armament
manufacturers like Armstrongs, Krupps and Creusot shared foreign
markets by agreement. In 1886 Nobel established the first international
trust, the Dynamite Trust Ltd. In the 1890’s J. and P. Coats Ltd created
a virtual world monopoly in cotton thread by amalgamating rival British,
continental and American firms. And since these were necessarily dis-
continuous developments — the kind of development which, once under-
taken, could not be repeated or advanced for a considerable time — the late
nineteenth century was distinguished not only from earlier periods but also
from the generation after 1900 by the extent to which they then took place.
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They were the consequence of a rapid increase in the complexity both
of enterprise and of the society in which it was being conducted — and of
the greater difficulties as well as of the greater opportunities which this was
producing. Firms grew with the expansion of production and the applica-
tion of technology, processes which necessitated greater size and greater
amounts of capital. The larger the firm the more easily it could aspire to
amalgamate others and, aided by technological break-throughs and the
growing integration of society, the more easily could it control prices and
achieve monopoly. The fortunes built up by Nobel and Rockefeller and
other pioneers of big business are examples of the success that could flow
from seizing such opportunities, and it was no doubt these opportunities
which Rockefeller, that great individualist, had in mind when he declared
that ‘the day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone,
never to return.’ But difficulties arose as often as opportunities at a time
when firms were multiplying rapidly and when it was becoming a con-
tinuous instead of an occasional feature of industrial life for established
methods to be rendered obsolete by innovation. Alongside every firm that
expanded in size or aspired to amalgamate others there were more than
one that, failing to expand or to survive the new competition, became ripe
for amalgamation. For every firm that sought association and monopoly
in order to expand markets and profits there was another that was led in
these directions by its need to conserve them, by the greater concern for
security that followed from requiring larger amounts of capital in condi-
tions of increasing competition. This was the major impetus behind the
movement towards organisation among agricultural producers. Unable
to concentrate and centralise after the fashion of the manufacturer or the
financier, these everywhere responded to changed conditions — in France
and Denmark from the early 1880’s, in Ireland from 1889, elsewhere from
the 1890’s — by setting up increasing numbers of co-operatives for the pro-
vision of credit, for insurance against risks and for the processing and
marketing of their produce.
The movement towards organisation and combination was not limited
to employers and producers. Among wage-earners and consumers,
friendly societies and co-operative stores, protected by new legislation,
multiplied all over Great Britain, western Europe and the United States
after 1880. Friendly societies were protected by legislation after 1875 in
Great Britain, where they had a membership of nearly 7 millions in 1885,
of nearly 14 millions in 1910. Co-operative societies were legislated for in
Great Britain in 1876, and there were over 1400 co-operative stores in the
country in 1900. Much the same growth of both occurred in the United
States and in Europe. There was at the same time an increase in trade
unions in these countries and a marked change in their character —
developments which spread to other areas, to the rest of Europe and to
Latin America, after 1890. The unions were also given legal recognition at
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INTRODUCTION
last, in Belgium, for example, in 1866, Austria in 1870, Great Britain
between 1870 and 1876, Spain in 1881, France (after partial recognition in
1864) in 1884, Germany after the collapse of the anti-socialist legislation
in 1 890 — in Russia, however, they remained illegal till 1 906. Breach of con-
tract by workmen was removed from the list of criminal offences. From
the middle of the 1 88o’s legislation was followed by the ‘ new unionism
The unions had previously been craft organisations, largely confined
in their membership to skilled workmen in particular trades and in their
function to providing mutual insurance against sickness, accident and
death and operating conciliation machinery between employer and em-
ployed. The ‘new unionism’ sought working-class organisation on a
national scale and by industries, rather than locally and by crafts, in
response to the situation in which, with the improvement of internal
communications, districts and jobs once localised were becoming com-
petitive with one another. It enlisted unskilled and semi-skilled labourers
as well as skilled artisans in response to the powerful effect of changes in
industry and the spread of elementary education in increasing the propor-
tion of semi-skilled workers and the chances of promotion. Compared
with the earlier unions the movement was more militant and political in
its objects and more closely linked with political creeds, especially social-
ism, or with social outlooks, as was the case with the Catholic-sponsored
unions of France, Austria, Italy, Germany and Belgium and with the
anarcho-syndicalist unions of the i890’s in Argentina, Chile and Mexico.
If they began to assume their modern character the unions increased
their membership far less in these years than did the friendly and co-
operative societies, and far less rapidly than they were to increase it after
1900. Between 1886 and 1900 union membership rose from million
(from about 1 million in 1875) to 2 millions in Great Britain, from 300,000
to 850,000 in Germany, from 50,000 to 250,000 in France. In America
the Federation of Labour had only half a million members in 1900. By
1913 membership had risen to 4 millions in Great Britain (where most of
the increase, from 2 \ to 4 millions, occurred after 1906); to 3 millions in
Germany; to 1 million in France. In the United States the A.F.L. had
ijr million members by 1904. They also made little progress before the
1900’s in their new functions. These facts are again explained partly by
the increased problems and partly by the improving conditions of the
age.
The growth of industrialisation and urbanisation, while it made the
organisation of working men physically easier, also involved a vast un-
planned and unpleasant upheaval in the conditions of living and a new
subjection to temporary and cyclical unemployment, the consequence of
the more rapid succession of technological change and industrial re-
organisation. It is not surprising that in these circumstances the increased
possibilities of collective self-help were chiefly applied by the growing
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numbers of the skilled and semi-skilled, who alone could afford it, to the
problem of material provision for family and individual through friendly
benefit schemes; or that trade-union membership among the unskilled —
potential competitors in several trades who were driven to undercut each
other with employers when times were bad — fell away rapidly after the
temporary success in organising them into general unions in the i88o’s,
and did not recover until the 1900’s. Both the general unions and the
unions which remained strongest, those representing skilled and semi-
skilled men in special crafts, continued, moreover, again until after 1900,
to negotiate for localities and on behalf of separate trades, in individual-
istic competition with each other; they made no progress towards col-
laboration or federation for nation-wide action on behalf of entire
industries, let alone for the devising of political programmes and parties
for pressure on governments on behalf of working men. And this was not
only because the uncertainty of permanent employment induced them to
continue to fend for themselves. Progress in these directions required a
new consciousness of the status of the worker in society. Despite their
inevitable future the unions remained at this time organisations among,
rather than of, the masses because public opinion, including that of the
workers themselves, with their more immediate preoccupations, was slow
to recognise the right of labour to unite for the enforcement of its claims.
It was on this account that they developed more rapidly in some newer
lands like Australia than they did in Europe.
On the other hand in the United States, almost as new a country, their
growth was slower than in Europe, and this was because in both areas,
though to a greater extent in the United States than in Europe, their
development into a major force in society was also delayed by favourable
circumstances. Although these were years of increased temporary un-
employment, over-all employment was well sustained despite the large
growth of population in the working age-groups. In Great Britain the
increase in over-all unemployment was only from 4 or 4 \ to 5 per cent
despite the fact that the working population increased from 10 millions to
about 14! millions between 1870 and 1901. For all except a minority,
chronic under-employment gave way to occasional and limited unemploy-
ment. In the United States most notably, but to a marked extent in all
industrial countries, they were years of increasing real wages. These rose
by about 75 per cent in Great Britain, by more than this in the United
States, by rather less in France and Germany, in contrast both to the
previous generation in which they had risen much less — the increase between
1873 and 1898 was more than six times greater than the increase between
1853 and 1 873 in Great Britain, more than twelve times greater in the United
States, more than double in France — and to the years between 1898 and
1914 when they were stationary. This was in consequence of the fall in
prices and the steady increase in the proportion of skilled and semi-
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INTRODUCTION
skilled to unskilled workmen — in the proportion of higher-paid occupa-
tions — in most industries. The proportion of skilled workers doubled in
Great Britain between 1 850 and 1 888, and continued to increase at at least
the same rate thereafter. The wage differential between skilled and un-
skilled workers was also steadily increasing and by 1900 skilled wages
were double those of the unskilled workers. Alongside the good level
of employment and rising wages there was the increasing range of
cheaper consumer products and the reduction that was taking place in
the size of the average family — in Great Britain this fell from 5-71 children
in 1860-85 to 4 66 in 1880-1905. These were years of improving standards
of living in which it became slowly less necessary to put children to work,
slowly less necessary for married women to work for a wage, slowly
possible to increase voluntary leisure and reduce hours of work.
The biggest share of the increase in the national incomes in all these
societies went to a minority — though it was to an enlarged minority and to
richer middle classes rather than to the aristocracies. But in addition to
the fact that the middle classes were being enlarged by the steady stream
of people who were moving out of the wage-earning classes into better-
paid occupations, the mass of the wage-earners, relative to their incomes
before 1870, improved their position even more than did the middle
classes. This relative improvement went on continuously, if slowly,
throughout the period. There had probably never been a time when,
materially, things had been so good for the bulk of the population; and
they were not to remain so good in the generation which followed. A sub-
stantial minority did not share in the improvement. It is probable that
the very poor became more, not less, miserable with the development of
urbanisation and the marketing of less nutritious cheap foods. But they
became a smaller proportion of society than at any earlier time, even if
there is no reason to believe that they declined in absolute numbers.
Better conditions were reconciling most people, and increasing numbers
of people, to changes in their living and working conditions. And not less
important in delaying the development of the trade unions and working-
class political parties, these were the years which saw the first considerable
amelioration of the lot of the working classes by the direct action of the
state.
In the long history of the modern state — a subject as full of pitfalls as
the rise of the middle class, of which in despair it has sometimes been con-
cluded that it has always been rising — this much is beyond dispute. It was
in the last third of the nineteenth century, wherever it has not been a
development of even more recent growth, that governments first under-
took the comprehensive regulation of society. Although there had been
earlier steps in this direction — all such developments are of long gestation
and slow growth — government in this sense existed hardly anywhere in
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1870. 1 Wherever government evolved at all after that date, except into
decline and collapse, it began to assume this character and to do so at
speed. The more advanced countries all witnessed in the next thirty years
an unprecedented increase in the powers and functions of government and
a fundamental alteration in the relations between government and society
— developments which are not rendered less impressive by the fact that
these powers and functions have gone on increasing, these relations
changing in the same direction, ever since.
Like the movements towards increased organisation within the state —
among employers and wage-earners, producers and consumers — the pro-
cess was the product of the simultaneous appearance of increasingly
pressing problems and of improved possibilities of dealing with them. It
went farther and faster than those other movements — and its progress was
partly responsible for delaying them — because it was one of the central
features of these years that while all manner of social problems assumed
so technical a character and such complex proportions that collective
self-help, despite its advance in the development of the business unit, the
friendly and co-operative society and the trade union, was increasingly
unable to deal with them, new means arose which only the state was able
to exploit. What was true of voluntary private organisation was hardly
less true of local government authorities. Although these were improved
and reformed, although some of them — Birmingham after 1873, Vienna
after 1890 — undertook important pioneering work in public planning and
control, although other towns, at least in Europe, followed up their work
or, more frequently, had it imposed upon them by central government
action, they were becoming ineffective without central assistance and
control. Every further stage in the internal transport revolution, in the
growth of industry, in the movement of population and the growth of
urban areas and in the complexity of society increased the inadequacy of
local authorities except as agents of the central government — and not least
because every advance in scientific and administrative knowledge revealed
that nothing less than central action would suffice if the knowledge was to
be applied.
This knowledge was also growing apace, in parallel with the problems.
It was partly the result of the autonomous development of science, as was
1 Great Britain is the only serious exception to 1870, which must in any case be an
approximation, as an important dividing line in this respect. It is generally agreed that the
‘ nineteenth century revolution in government ’ was taking place in Britain from about 1 830,
during the so-called age of laissez-faire, and the beginnings of the regulatory state can be
pointed to in the creation of the Metropolitan police (1829), the appointment of the first
factory inspectors (1833) and of the first emigration officers (1833), the assumption by the
state of a share of the responsibility for elementary education (1833), the setting up of the
Poor Law Commissioners (1834) and the institution of prison inspection (1835). But even
in Great Britain there was much hesitation in, and some retreat from, the collectivist trend
between the i 84 o’s and about 1870, and from about 1870 a great advance in the scope
and an important change in the tone of legislation.
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INTRODUCTION
especially the case in the field of public health. Very little of the enormous
progress that was now made in this field would have been possible without
the success of the founders of preventive medicine — of Pasteur, Lister,
Virchow and Koch— in the ten years after 1867 in establishing that many
diseases were caused by microbes and could be avoided by simple pre-
cautions and procedures like asepsis and inoculation. It was partly due
to the accumulation of practical experience of the new conditions of
society by increasing numbers of experts, either self-appointed reformers
or officials. The cumulative experience of the inspectors and administra-
tors in regulating factories, mines and public health, as in supervising
education, was a most powerful influence in producing government action
and in extending government attention to wider and wider fields. But the
work of the scientists and the agitation of the individual reformers, like
the experience of the official, would have been of little avail if they had not
been backed by the power of central government.
If these considerations created the opportunity for governments, as the
urbanisation and industrialisation of society created or at least increased
the problems, governments now seized the opportunity, as never before,
because central action was becoming both more practicable and more
necessary. The changes in society which were producing the problems were
simultaneously making it more feasible to deal with them. It was easier
to insist on the provision of water, sanitation, hospitals and roads among
dense populations, and among populations served by fast transport, than
it was among scattered and ill-connected communities, and easier also to
regulate and supervise such things as working conditions. It was also
more essential to do so. Widespread disease, for example, or unhealthy
working conditions became preventable — if only by state action — at a
time when, in conditions of mass living and mass working, it was a matter
of public efficiency and political necessity, rather than of individual need
and private conscience, to prevent them. It was for these two reasons that
whereas a large part of the history of the nineteenth century before the
i870’s is to be explained by the inability or unwillingness of governments
to adjust their attitudes and enlarge their activities at the rate required by
social change — and perhaps at a rate made possible by the growth of
knowledge — the attitudes and activities of some governments now began
to draw level with the more pressing problems. Wherever the develop-
ment of industrialisation, urbanisation and knowledge — or the search for
more rapid progress in industrialisation, urbanisation and the use of
knowledge — forced government to respond, in Austria as well as in Great
Britain, in Japan and Latin America as well as in Europe, to different
extents in accordance with the different rates of change within different
societies and the varying efficiency of governments, but with little regard
to the political complexion of governments, the same increase of govern-
ment took place. The agents of local authorities began to be joined by,
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and supervised by, the agents of central governments ; increasing numbers
of experts and officials pressed upon central governments the need for the
proliferation of legislation and the expansion of their own powers;
governments began to invoke the most stringent powers of compulsion
for social and public ends and ‘the grammar of common legislation
acquired the novel virtue of the imperative mood’. 1
The process developed farthest and fastest in four fields in which only
the most tentative steps had been taken anywhere by 1 870 — public health,
elementary education, the regulation of working conditions and the
government ownership or control of public utilities. In those fields it
developed at different rates in different countries.
Throughout western Europe, North America and Australasia in the
next thirty years, beginning with the string of Acts on food and drink
standards, sanitation, health and housing conditions in England between
i860 and 1875, there was continuous legislation and continuous develop-
ment of administrative and enforcement machinery on these questions in
the cause of public health. The effects were startling, especially in the
towns, and not least important among the reasons for the great growth of
population in these areas. As early as 1880 the battle was being won
against the important killing diseases — plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox,
cholera, scarlet fever — and the city was being made healthier than the
countryside for the first time in history. The death-rate in England and
Wales, which at 22 per 1000 was as high in 1870 as in 1840, and twice as
high for some towns as for the country as a whole, declined in almost
every quinquennium after 1870 and was brought down to 181 in the
1890’s, to 15-2 in the 1900’s. The average expectation of life increased by
more than ten years during the same period. Similar improvement was
achieved throughout these areas. In Russia, by way of contrast, the
death-rate was still 35 per 1000 in 1890 — the highest in Europe — and
beyond Europe it was higher still.
In the same areas — and beyond them, exceptionally, in Japan — rapidly
changing economies and societies, with their growing need for skilled and
semi-skilled labour and clerical staff and for better training even of the
unskilled, also demanded, and were seen to demand, equal attention to
the provision of compulsory and free elementary education. From a situa-
tion in which in 1870 in Great Britain a substantial part of the child
population, in Japan perhaps the whole of it, was still left untouched in a
state of ignorance, the development of national education systems pro-
ceeded so fast that by 1895, except in rapidly growing towns, there was a
school place for every child in Great Britain and for 61 per cent of the
child population in Japan, where 95 per cent were at school by 1906. These
1 Dr John Simon, of the English Public Health Act of 1 866, quoted by G. Kitson Clark
in ‘The Modem State and Modem Society’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great
Britain, vol. xxxvii (1959), pp. 561-2.
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INTRODUCTION
figures are a measure of the progress made in all the more advanced
countries by that date. The education provided was still of the simplest
kind. Secondary schooling advanced much more slowly. But the effects
of this transformation upon society and on the individual can hardly be
overestimated.
The advances in public health and education were accompanied in most
of these countries by the extension of state control over working condi-
tions. Factory laws were introduced— in Belgium, the Netherlands,
Switzerland in the i87o’s, in Austria from 1883, in Italy and Spain from
1886, in France from the i89o’s. Where they existed already they were
extended, as by the British Factory Acts of 1878, 1886, 1891 and 1901 —
— the last two of these introduced into England the principle of delegated
legislation by permitting the Home Office to make further large changes
in regulations without further legislation — to deal with shops and laundries
as well as factories, with the working-hours of men as well as of women and
children, with the control of occupational diseases as well as with simpler
safety regulations. A more novel departure was the introduction of com-
pulsory insurance against accident and sickness for working men. Here
the lead was taken by Germany. Bismarck’s insurance programmes of
1883-9 were copied in many European countries between 1887 and the
end of the century — by Austria in 1887-8, Switzerland in 1890, Denmark
in 1891 and 1898, Belgium in 1894 and 1903, Italy in 1898. Where they
were not adopted in industrialised countries, as in Great Britain — where
the state at least obliged employers to compensate workmen for acci-
dents — and the United States, it was because the earlier development of
private enterprise and of a strong liberal tradition had set up resistances
to state intervention which could not easily be overcome.
On this account and also because of the rapid expansion of opportunity
for the individual that was now taking place, the United States lagged
behind Great Britain and western Europe in the development of factory
and insurance legislation and of other inroads into the principle of
freedom of contract. Even there, however, by way of retaliation, the state
was forced by the emphasis on freedom for the individual to attempt to
regulate capitalism in the interests of freedom of competition. Although
progress was slow before 1900, the Act of 1887 for the supervision of
railways and the Sherman anti-trust Act of 1890 led the way in making
trusts in restraint of trade illegal and in subjecting the business world to
the danger of prosecution by agents of the central government; and even
in the United States, despite the federal system, the spoils system and the
strongly established opposition to a professional civil service (as being
an aristocracy), considerable strides were made in the expansion of the
central government’s powers and the development of a professional civil
service for this and other tasks, particularly after 1883. More work was
done by central government and by civil servants than in any previous
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period in American history, and it necessitated the proliferation of
Committees of Congress.
For similar reasons the United States, and, to a lesser extent. Great
Britain remained behind in the process by which governments were
driven, by the necessity for economic expansion and public efficiency, to
nationalise or to control in other ways the more complex public utilities.
In Great Britain, because of the earlier development of local authorities
and the continuing strength of private enterprise, the taking over of the
telegraph and of an increasing proportion of the telephone service was the
only important addition to the services provided directly by the central
government. In the United States even these remained in private hands;
so in both countries did the railways, though they were assisted by public
subsidies and subjected to the beginnings of government regulation. In
Great Britain, but not in the United States, there was far more extension
of the functions of local authorities, assisted by central loans and grants.
By 1900 these had compulsorily acquired most of the waterworks and
many of the gas, electricity and tramway undertakings of the country. In
these later fields, however, private enterprise continued to flourish and
some of the largest and most rapidly expanding companies were private
and not municipal. In many European states, on the other hand, in
Belgium, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, Roumania, Serbia,
the telegraph and telephone services and the railways were taken over by
the government from the beginning of the period, and the central govern-
ment allowed less freedom to private enterprise and less discretion to local
authorities in the provision of other public utilities. In less developed
states, both in Europe and beyond, in Japan and Latin America, in India
under its British government — wherever the effort was being made to
become more developed — while progress with public health, labour legisla-
tion and compulsory education 1 was difficult and negligible on account of
the backwardness of the economy and of administration, even greater
steps were taken towards central control in these other directions. In
India the railways and vast irrigation schemes — developments which had
indirect effects in improving public health by eliminating death from
starvation in India from 1880 until 1943 — in Latin America not only the
railways but also gas, electricity, water and other services, in Russia and
Japan not only public utilities but also a considerable sector of industry,
finance and trade were brought under central ownership or close central
regulation.
If health, education, industrial working conditions and public utilities
were the problems which called most urgently for attention and which, in
these varying degrees and circumstances, received most attention, there
1 But Japan was a large exception here. See pp. 20, 179, 472. Otherwise only slight
advance in primary education was made in India and a few La tin- American countries
and none elsewhere.
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INTRODUCTION
was no neat dividing line for expanding governments in rapidly changing
societies between more and less essential tasks. Once it had set in, more-
over, the tendency towards ‘ the constant extension and improvement of
the mechanism of government . . . and the increasing application of a new
system of centralisation’ 1 became a force in itself, autonomous almost,
and it spread as far and as fast as conditions required and as physical
difficulties and the resistances thrown up by social habits and political
interests would permit. In Russia, in eastern and in parts of southern
Europe, in most areas beyond Europe where it began at all, it was limited
by backwardness and opposition even in the urgent fields. In the United
States, except in education which was regarded as an individual right, it
was similarly restricted, but more by established traditions, the federal
structure and the buoyancy of private enterprise than by physical diffi-
culties. In Great Britain and western Europe, however, effective state
intervention in society, either direct or through the central regulation of
local authorities, was established in all these fields and on a broader front :
by the provision and inspection of prisons and reformatories, of homes
and hospitals, as well as of schools ; by the provision of subsidies and the
imposition of fixed rents and compensation for improvements on behalf
of tenant farmers as well as by the regulation of factory conditions; and,
not less important, by the resort to income taxes as a means of meeting
the growing expenditure on social services and to the use of taxation
itself— of graduated income taxes and capital taxes— as a means of social
reform and of controlling wealth.
Until about 1870 in Great Britain most of the revenue of the central
government had come from indirect taxes on articles of consumption
and more than half of its expenditure had been absorbed by the pay-
ment of interest on and the cost of managing the national debt. Its
main financial task had been to redistribute a small proportion of the
national income from the poor to the rich. In other countries this was the
case to an even greater extent. Even though change in the same direction
was to proceed at a far more rapid rate from the 1900’s, the beginnings of
a fundamental change had already taken place in this respect by the end
of the century. Income tax had ceased to be regarded in Great Britain —
since the 1880’s — as an unfortunate emergency device and had been
adopted for the first time — since the 1 890’s — in several European countries :
in Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway and Spain. Income taxes, as more
came to be required of them, were being graduated so as to fall more
heavily on higher incomes and were beginning to be supplemented — in
Great Britain after the 1880’s and especially after 1894, in France from
1901 — by death duties. In Great Britain, apart from the fact that revenue
from local rates on property had risen much more proportionately since
1 A. V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (2nd ed., 1914),
pp. 306-7.
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1870 than revenue from national taxes, the rise in the contribution of
income taxes and death duties to total taxation (rates and taxes) had risen
from a negligible figure to 30 per cent. In European countries the speed
and extent of the change was somewhat lower, and a larger part of the
increased expenditure was still met by indirect taxes on consumer goods.
Growing expenditure was for some of these governments perhaps as im-
portant as the changing world economic situation as a reason for resort-
ing to higher tariffs after the i870’s. But in these countries as well as in
Great Britain it was in the last years of the nineteenth century that the
first breach was made in the old attitude to taxation and expenditure.
In these countries, indeed, so much had been done by the end of the
century that it is important to specify what was not achieved or not yet
attempted. The advance in public health had sprung mainly from the
control of the physical environment : substantial improvements in medical
services and in health practices, which together brought about a further
decline in the death-rate, and particularly in the mortality rate for infants
and for the old, came only after 1900. Infant mortality rates were as high
in 1891-1901 as in the 1840’s; the reduction in mortality had been very
small for those over 45 and chiefly affected adults below 35. State or
municipal provision of working-class housing still lay in the future ; it was
still on a very small scale in 1914. The extended factory legislation had
dealt only with hours of work, age-limits and standards of safety and
health; and while hours remained high despite their slight reduction — in
Great Britain since 1870 they had fallen from about 60 to about 55 per
week — minimum wage-rates had to await a still more socially-minded
generation. Their adoption, a major departure from Victorian ortho-
doxy, was first undertaken in Great Britain in 1909, 1912 and 1914.
Insurance against unemployment, as opposed to accident and sickness,
and insurance at the expense of the state, as opposed to the employer and
the employee, found no place in the various insurance programmes before
1911. Nowhere yet did public social policy concern itself with the pro-
blem of poverty, and it was perhaps the greatest failure of the age that
poverty was allowed to persist in the midst of plenty, if not to increase.
No state yet possessed either the knowledge or the outlook which would
together make the regulation of the economy and the avoidance of un-
employment a major object of policy in many countries after another fifty
years. The provision of universal compulsory elementary education in-
volved huge administrative, building and teacher-training programmes
which could only proceed slowly. Hardly anywhere were they completed
in 1900, and nowhere had the state, as opposed to individual initiative and
private benevolence, provided much assistance towards university and
secondary education. Income tax and even graduated income tax had
been introduced to meet growing government expenditure, but even in the
most advanced of communities an income tax at the rate of 15. 2 d. in the
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INTRODUCTION
pound was regarded in 1901 as almost unsupportable in time of peace.
Income tax in Great Britain rose steadily from 1875 until it reached 8 d.
in 1885. It did not rise above this figure until the outbreak of the Boer
War at the end of the century, when it reached 15. 3 d. After that war
it was brought back to is., but had got back to ij. 2d. between 1910
and 1914. Most states still relied heavily on direct consumer taxes, and
notably on tariffs, which fell on poor and rich alike. Nevertheless, the
provision of social needs and the control of social problems by central
governments, for all these limitations on their scope, had proceeded so
far by the beginning of the twentieth century, and in thirty years, at least
in the foremost European countries, that — as has been said of the British
Local Government Bill of 1888 — they had already ‘transformed the tissue
of existence’ and brought ‘the entire range of ordinary life, from
birth, or even before birth, to burial, . . .within the ambit of public interest
and observation’. 1
These were policies which, once taken up, could not be reversed or
ignored, and if there could be no going back it was equally impossible to
stand still. In the more advanced societies from the early years of the
twentieth century further progress in the same direction had become the
test, applied with increasing impatience, of acceptable government.
Before much longer governments in the rest of the world would be faced
with the choice of courting political chaos or attempting to follow suit.
This was not yet true between 1870 and 1900. In marked contrast with
the undercurrents of economic, technical and social change — but also in
consequence of them — the period was one of comparative stability in
domestic politics, of negligible development in the constitutional sphere,
of conservatism in political outlook.
Throughout the hundred years to 1875 — and even during the last
fifteen of them, which witnessed the American Civil War, the Polish insur-
rection, the Meiji revolution in Japan, the fall of the Empire in France
and the restoration of monarchy in Spain as well as the many readjust-
ments involved in the unification of Germany and Italy — revolutions or
attempted revolutions and violent changes of political regime had been
common occurrences. Throughout much of the world since 1905 internal
politics have been no less unsettled. In the intervening generation, at least
in those countries that were caught up in economic and social change, it
was otherwise. In old and predominantly monarchical Europe, except that
new states — themselves monarchies — were erected in Roumania and
Bulgaria on the basis of Balkan nationalism and Ottoman decline; in the
New World — predominantly republican — except for the downfall of its
only monarchy in Brazil, the overthrow of Spanish rule in Cuba by the
combined efforts of local nationalism and American expansion, and the
1 G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, p. 151.
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continuation of civil war and coup d'etat in the smaller Latin American
states which were hardly touched by economic and social change; in
Japan with its even newer order ; in the other centres of white settlement
beyond Europe — in none of these areas were there changes or even
attempted changes of political regime. This was the longest period of
comparatively unbroken internal stability that they experienced in the
nineteenth century — that they have experienced in the past 150 years.
Even within the framework of the established regimes there was little
constitutional change. In the constitutions of all these countries except
Japan and Russia 1 a parliament of a sort was already established in 1870:
none of these parliaments, with the exception of those of Great Britain,
Belgium and the United States, had more than nominal powers against the
executive. In the next thirty years no new parliament was introduced
except in Japan ; and in no country except France did the legislature make
significant strides towards a system of parliamentary control over the
executive comparable to that which Great Britain, Belgium and the
United States — but also in an earlier age — had developed. Elsewhere the
executive government, whether it was monarchical or republican, easily
retained its power and position or enlarged them. Even in Great Britain,
Belgium and the United States, while parliamentary control remained
firmly established, the legislature entered upon the beginning of a decline
in relation to the executive. In the United States the period began with a
bid for the supremacy of Congress over the President and the Supreme
Court, but ended with Congress in retreat before the development of the
powers of the Presidency and a steady increase in the vetoing and inter-
preting of Congressional Acts by the Court. In Great Britain the golden
age of the independent Member of Parliament and of House of Com-
mons initiative in legislation gave way before increasing party organisation
and increasing control of the business of the House by the cabinet which
controlled the majority party. In Belgium Leopold II succeeded in
removing overseas activities and policies from parliamentary surveillance
and in particular created, through his International African Association, a
personal, not to say a despotic, sovereignty over the Congo Free State.
At another level of politics, because of the continuing and often growing
strength of the executive in relation to the legislature, political parties in
most states either continued to be coteries of oligarchs and notabilities
manoeuvring for office and cut off from the public or, if they became mass
parties like the Social Democrat party in Germany, remained cut off from
political influence or hope of power. At this level the political systems of
Great Britain and her self-governing colonies, of the United States and of
1 The only other states without a parliament in the whole of Europe were Montenegro
and Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz (which retained medieval estates
systems until 1918) and Turkey. Beyond Europe, in the areas mentioned, the more un-
important Latin American countries were the only exceptions apart from Japan.
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INTRODUCTION
France were perhaps the only ones which experienced appreciable develop-
ment from within — organic changes in the complex relations between
government and the governed as opposed to the development of new
tactics for maintaining old political structures. They bore witness to the
prevailing political character of the age by moving towards conservatism
in political outlook.
In Great Britain, where republican sentiments were not uncommon in
the 1870’s and a lengthy Liberal administration was in power between 1880
and 1885, the following twenty years were years of almost unbroken rule
by the Conservative party. Between the Civil War and the end of the
century the United States, once the beacon of European radicals, moved
steadily towards a uniformity behind conservative beliefs ; the increasingly
conservative Republican party was in the ascendant; radical proposals
for political and economic change won less and less support ; and even the
Populist agitation of the period, which might seem to form an exception to
these trends, was in tune with them in being fundamentally a demand for
more government — a protest against the fact that, on account of the con-
tinuing strength of the laissez-faire attitude to government, the country
lagged behind western Europe in social reform and industrial legislation
after 1880. In France — even in France — divisions and dogmas on consti-
tutional questions, which were almost everywhere losing the force they
had once possessed, receded behind the determination of the Opportunist
republicans, conservative, empirical and almost uninterruptedly in power
from the early i88o’s to 1898, to govern by avoiding all contentious
measures except those raised by their insistence on social reform.
Conservatism in these Western countries would preserve the great
achievements of an earlier liberal era ; its practitioners worked within an
accepted and continuing liberal ethos. It was to these achievements and
to such an ethos that in Russia and Turkey, on the other hand, conserva-
tism became more than ever opposed. Yet those countries also experi-
enced the conservative trend, even if it there took the form of reaction
after a period of liberalising measures by authoritarian governments
during the i86o’s and i870’s. So it was with the other face of that trend,
the decline of liberalism. It was a process whose wide extent is ob-
scured only if historians are misled — as men, in Gibbon’s phrase, are
governed — by names. So-called ‘liberal’ parties remained in power in
several states. Wherever they were in power for any length of time, as in
Latin America, Italy, Hungary and Roumania, their outlook and pro-
grammes had little in common with those of traditional western Euro-
pean liberalism. In proportion as liberal parties adhered to that outlook
and those programmes they were either proscribed, as in Russia and
Turkey, or else they lost influence, following and office and underwent
those internal divisions, that narrowing of imagination in favour of
sectarianism and dogmatic beliefs, which were eventually, in the twentieth
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
century, to complete their decline — a process observable throughout
western Europe and in Great Britain, as well as in the United States, where
the Democrat party remained more strictly liberal than its Republican
opponents.
The varying character of the liberal decline, as of conservative aims,
may suggest that it is misleading, even in the cause of necessary generalisa-
tion, to argue that such diverse states shared common political trends ; even
more misleading to explain those trends by the same considerations. What
the evidence in fact reveals is that all these states moved in a conservative
direction from different points of departure, and what is significant is that,
if at different levels, they all moved in the same conservative direction.
There was one main reason for this. They were struck by the economic
and social changes of the age when they were at different stages of eco-
nomic development and in possession of different political structures, the
product of their different previous histories. They underwent these
changes to different extents. But they all experienced the major political
consequence of those changes, the beginnings of modern government. If
they all experienced as well a period of political stability or stagnation, if
liberalism was exhausted in some, distorted in others, frustrated in others,
in a general conservative trend, it was primarily because the rise of the
modern state, whatever the consequences for the future, at this time
buttressed the existing forms of government — whatever those forms
might be — by socialising government’s attitudes and by increasing govern-
ment’s power.
Whether the outcome was stability or stagnation, whether it arose more
from the changed attitudes of a government or from a government’s reli-
ance on its increased power, was determined by a network of circumstances,
both past and present, in each individual case. In some states — on the
whole those of north-western Europe and the English-speaking world
which were most politically advanced and which experienced the most rapid
social and economic change — it was the change in government attitudes
which was crucial. Here the pressure on government for political change
was also reduced because economic and technological advance was creat-
ing improved real wages and living-standards. This fact, which helped to
delay the development of the labour unions and working-class political
parties and to keep them from political agitation, also, in conjunction with
the fear of the danger of working-class organisation, helped to ally the
growing middle classes with conservative governments. It was especially
influential in the United States, where there was always some pursuit more
profitable than politics, and in Germany, where the Social Democrat
party, Marxist in inspiration and in its programmes, nevertheless —
though without success in reassuring the middle class — became revisionist
in practice, a pressure group which sought a greater share for the workers
in the profits of industry rather than the undermining of society or even a
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greater share for the workers in the government of the state. Nowhere,
however, except in the United States where this other process was delayed,
was material improvement in itself so influential as the fact that govern-
ments were anticipating those discontents that would otherwise have
sustained or created the demand for political change. Except in the
United States the extension of central control and intervention in the
social field had two things in common in all these states. It was benefiting
society most at the less-well-to-do levels where improvement was most
needed; it was taking place on government initiative and not in con-
sequence of public agitation. In Great Britain it was regarded as a para-
dox at the time that measures which had so much effect upon society, and
which were so widely welcomed when introduced, were preceded by so
little public demand.
What was true of the growth of government control of society was also
true of the one direct change effected in these years in the political con-
text in which these governments operated, of the democratisation of the
suffrage. Although women nowhere got the vote except in Australia and
New Zealand before the twentieth century — Finland and Norway led the
way elsewhere in 1907 — universal equal manhood suffrage, which existed
only in the United States (except for the Southern Negroes) and the
British self-governing colonies in 1870, was now approached in these
countries, and in some it was achieved. It was approached to different
extents and at different times in different countries, but the varying
extensions of the franchise took place on the initiative of government, not
as a concession wrested from government by those who got the vote.
There was sometimes opposition to the extension, more than there was to
government intervention in social matters; some governments insisted
upon it despite this fact. In this matter as in the extension of government
functions in society the difference between the motives of these govern-
ments, however different their circumstances, is not easy to detect: the
initiative was generally taken, as by Disraeli and Bismarck early in the
period, from the conviction that an enlarged electorate would be pre-
ponderantly conservative. The difference is immense, on the other hand,
between this period, with its government initiative and its absence of
political agitation, and the age which had held — in Lord Melbourne’s
phrase — that ‘the whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to
preserve contracts’; and which had produced in England the struggle for
the first Reform Act, Chartism and the repeal of the Corn Laws and in
Europe the revolutions of 1830 to 1849. Nor can there be any doubt of the
connection between the initiative and the lack of agitation. It was govern-
ment action in regulating society, introducing direct and graded taxation
and extending the franchise which chiefly accounts for the decline of class
bitterness and the prevailing political stability of these years.
At the opposite extreme were countries where the suffrage was not
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extended — Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Roumania,
Serbia and some of the German states retained their highly restricted
franchises, although Austria extended its four-class system of indirect
representation to include a fifth class for the mass of the population in
1896 — or where, as in Russia until after the revolution of 1905 and
Turkey until after the revolution of 1908, it remained non-existent. Here
the governments relied less on the anticipation of discontent and more
on their increasing ability to suppress it. This was especially true in
eastern Europe. In this area traditional forms of governments, sub-
jected to little change for many years, coincided with a situation in which
economic and social change was producing worsened, not improved,
material conditions, and failed to coincide with ethnographical divisions.
The same increase of population which made an essential contribution to
Germany’s industrial revolution outpaced the rate of industrialisation in
Russia and eastern Europe, where almost alone in Europe the rural
population increased at a greater rate than ever before, creating poverty,
land-hunger and widespread economic unrest. This was also true of
southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, but on a smaller scale, and emigra-
tion was easier from these areas. The same social and economic changes
and the same national sentiment which in western Europe reconciled the
middle classes to established authority had the effect in this area, in less-
developed political structures, of putting some part at any rate of those
classes, as in western Europe half a century earlier, against it. In circum-
stances like these and most markedly in Russia and Turkey, where
parliaments did not exist and political parties were still regarded as
conspiracies, serious discontent was kept at bay only by the increasing
efficiency of the police, army and administration. The absence of political
and constitutional change, in some countries chiefly the consequence of a
changed attitude on the part of government and a changed relationship
between government and society, assisted by improving economic condi-
tions, was here, in circumstances of social and economic deterioration,
mainly the consequence of the great increase that was taking place in
government power.
In between these extremes there was every variation. In some countries
the suffrage was only slightly extended. In Italy the legislation of 1882,
the only extension in this period, extended the suffrage to 7 per cent of the
population; in Japan the suffrage was granted for the first time by the
electoral law of 1890 to about one in ten of the population, chiefly land-
owners; in India the British government decided to develop representa-
tive institutions on Western lines in 1880 and the electoral principle had
spread from local to national assemblies, though on a restricted suffrage,
by 1892. In others a highly restricted franchise was abruptly abandoned,
usually in favour of universal suffrage, only at the end of this period : in
Spain in 1890, in Belgium in 1893, in Norway in 1898, in Baden in 1900,
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INTRODUCTION
in Bavaria and Wiirttemberg in 1906. In some the social activities of
government remained more abreast of the public mind, the repressive
actions of government less extreme, than they did in others. Centralised
enlightened despotism, as in India, or increasingly efficient dictatorships
of order and progress which, as in Japan and Latin- American states,
clothed their oligarchical and forcible character with social programmes
and a veil of constitutionalism were some of the results. But it is impos-
sible to generalise except to say that government in all these cases relied
on a mixture of force and reform, in varying proportions but to a greater
extent than was the case at the extremes, for the avoidance of discontent
and the preservation of order.
It is possible, on the other hand, to exaggerate the differences at the
extremes, and to do so would be to obscure some important characteristics
of the period in the history of the most advanced states. The embracing of
social reform and the extension of the franchise by these governments
were not the same thing as the advance of democracy. If the decisions to
take these steps were usually administrative rather than political man-
oeuvres— exercises in the use of established authority rather than con-
sequences of a struggle for the possession of authority— neither did they
have much effect as yet in altering the composition of the governing
classes. In few countries were they accompanied, as they were in Great
Britain as a result of the Ballot Act of 1872 and the Redistribution Act of
1885, by secrecy of voting and an equitable distribution of constituencies.
Although the extension of the franchise, by creating mass electorates,
would one day alter the forms and institutions of politics — would force
political parties to transform themselves from oligarchies into mass organi-
sations, with new men as members and new techniques of oratory and
journalism for getting the voters to the polls — this transformation, both
for this reason and because of the continuing limitation on the powers of
parliament as against the executive, was a slow process.
Even in Great Britain, where the power of parliament and secrecy
of voting enabled it to set in early, the continuation of plural votes — half
a million voters still exercised plural votes after 1885 and some individuals
enjoyed as many as nine votes — and the existence of a long-established
and recognised governing class delayed it and ensured that democracy
would advance at no formidable pace. The social structure of the govern-
ing class was slowly changing, as the middle class was increasing: it was
from 1885 that the number of industrialists among the peers began to
increase significantly. But politically the situation was not seriously
different in 1900 from what it had been in the 1870’s, when eighty peers
had sons in the House of Commons and a third to a half of the members of
the cabinet were peers. The German Social Democrat party, the only one
outside Great Britain and the United States to develop a mass following
despite the handicaps, discovered that the structure of government did
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not permit party strength to be translated into political influence and
power. In the United States, the only country where democracy in this
sense had been long established and was at all developed, there was even a
sharp reaction against it. The period saw the beginnings of a profound
distrust of democracy among intellectuals and the rich, who regretted
that a recognised governing class had failed to establish itself. These were
the years (1870-1910) when manages de convenance between American
heiresses and European noblemen were particularly frequent — a fact
which, whatever light it throws on the history of the European nobility, is
surely significant of the movement of opinion among the wealthy in the
United States. Although universal suffrage was in principle ineradicable,
its extension to the Negroes was in practice avoided by evasion of the
Constitution, and it was the fear of majority rule by powerful interests,
and the consequent wish both to revere the Constitution rather than the
Declaration of Independence and to place the Constitution beyond the
reach of the electorate, that underlay the increase in the influence of the
Supreme Court against that of Congress and of the legislatures of the
component states of the Union.
If even in the least authoritarian of states there was little alteration in
the composition of the governing class, little advance towards democracy
and some reaction against it, it was also the case that, in those states as
much as in more authoritarian lands, the strength of authority was
steadily increasing— just as there was at least an effort in some of the
authoritarian states to regulate and improve society. Of all the expanding
governments at this time it may be said that it was not only in the interests
of society that they were intervening in the social sphere, and not only in
the social sphere that they were adding to their competence and their
powers. All, the least as well as the most authoritarian, were improving
in executive and administrative efficiency ; all relied on this development —
on the growth and professionalisation of the bureaucracy, the army and
the police; on the vast improvement in weapons and transport; on the
increased possibilities of controlling public opinion and securing public
loyalty through influence on the press, the widespread adoption of con-
scription and the provision of state education; on all these causes and
consequences of increasing centralisation — for the maintenance of stabil-
ity. This reliance was in different degrees and assumed different forms
according to how far it was modified by inherited political framework and
a progressive government attitude. But even in the least authoritarian of
states it played a part in maintaining order and political stability which, if
indirect, was greater than ever before and only less important than social
reform, the extension of the suffrage and the increased confidence between
government and society to which these things gave rise.
These facts are central to an understanding of the politics of the age.
It was distinguished, even in the least authoritarian of states, as much by
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INTRODUCTION
the growth of authority as by the extension of democracy ; and less by the
extension of democracy and the democratisation of government than by
an advance towards the democratisation of government policies and of
the political context in which governments operated. It is these facts
which account for the collapse of liberalism — for its exhaustion in more
democratic countries as well as for its frustration in less democratic
circumstances and its distortion in situations that were in between.
In the advanced countries of western Europe during the 1870’s, when
liberalism was at its zenith in its European home, liberal governments,
abandoning the liberal opposition to the power of the state and seeing the
state as the most effective means of securing the liberal conception of free-
dom in changed circumstances, accepted the early steps towards the
inevitable extension of the functions of government and the use of un-
precedented state compulsion on individuals for social ends — embracing
the notion of state education, legalising trade unions, justifying public
health measures, adopting even insurance and factory legislation. No
governments in such countries, whatever their political complexion,
could, indeed, have opposed such developments. From the end of the
1870’s, however, they were overrun and overturned in those countries by
the further progress of those twin forces, the masses and the modem state.
Every advance in the role of the state, every new aspect of the social
problem, every recognition of the emergence of the masses, every new
turn of policy — whether towards protectionism and imperialism or to-
wards social regulation and the extension of the franchise — conflicted
with the liberal belief in freedom of contract and of enterprise, in free
trade, in individual liberty, in public economy, in the minimum of
government interference. Liberalism’s great contribution, the constitutional
state, and its guiding principles, the freedom of the individual, legal equality
and conflict with the Church, were — to the varying extents that they had
been already established in these states — taken over by more empirical
and conservative politicians. Liberalism became more doctrinaire and
more narrowly associated with urban and big business interests — even
while industrial organisation itself, with the movement from personal to
corporate control, was deserting it. The liberal parties split into moderate
(national, social or imperialist) and radical wings on these current issues
and lost office. Liberal rule or its equivalent ended in Great Britain in
1885, in Germany in 1878, in Austria and the Netherlands in 1879, in
Sweden in 1880, in Belgium in 1884, in France in 1885. In Italy under
Depretis and Crispi and in some states beyond western Europe liberal
parties remained in power. But, liberal only in name, they embraced pro-
tectionism and imperialism, undertook social regulation and retained of
the old liberal creed only opposition to the extension of the franchise and
to the pretensions of the Church. In these states, as in even more authori-
tarian countries, authentic liberalism remained a relevant if a weakened
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basis for opposition to established authority. But even in that role, and even
when it was not proscribed by the increased possibilities of repression, it
was doomed to frustration by the growth of the need for social regulation
and strong government and by the demand for those things by the mass of
the population.
Liberalism’s decline was reflected after 1880 in the new lease of life
acquired by conservative parties and by the formation of new confessional
parties in politics — most of which were representative of a catholic-social
movement, as were the Centre party in Germany, the Christian Socialist
party in Austria, the Clerical parties of Belgium, the Netherlands and
Switzerland, ‘Liberal Action’ in France and ‘Popular Action’ in Italy,
and all of which made a democratic appeal with their devotion to tradi-
tional institutions, their criticism of the materialism underlying liberal
economic theories and their adoption of social programmes — no less
than in the spread of socialist sentiment. The conservative trend was
strengthened, indeed, by socialist rivalry. Socialism, liberalism’s historical
supplanter, was also its logical successor as the critic and antagonist of
existing society, and not only because it made its appeal to the masses of
men: it would itself use all the powers of modern government and all the
resources of modern repression to achieve its ends, even if it believed that
when those ends were achieved the need for repression and the state itself
would wither away. But socialism as yet created fear more effectively
than it won adherence. It was delayed and frustrated in authoritarian
states, where it would one day assert itself the more violently on this
account, by repression; in more liberal states, where it lost ground in
favour of constitutional reform and even of compromise with monarchical
authority, by improving economic conditions and the anticipatory
actions of the governments; everywhere by the dogmatic quarrels neces-
sarily engendered among its followers by so precise and comprehensive
a creed.
It would be war, with its attendant moral and material dislocations and
with the attendant loss of faith in some governments and loss of power
by others, that would in the event provide socialism with its first oppor-
tunity and with much following. But in the last third of the nineteenth
century war on any large scale was as conspicuously absent as internal
political and constitutional change.
There was an even longer period of peace between the great powers
after 1871 — it was to last till 1914 — than there had been between 1815 and
1854, and the period was not especially disturbed by minor wars. Between
1854 and 1870 there had been five wars involving one or more of the
world’s leading states, which were all in Europe, in sixteen years: after
years of slowly changing relative strength among those states the existing
international order — the territorial arrangements and the political assump-
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INTRODUCTION
tions of the 1815 settlement — had ceased to represent the real distribution
of power and interests. The latest and most resounding of those con-
flicts — those which had resulted in the forcible exclusion of Austria from
Italy and Germany ; in the defeat of France by Prussia ; in the seizure of
Rome and the papal states by Italy without a declaration of war or the
sanction of an international conference; in the seizure of Alsace and
Lorraine by Prussia without the sanction of a conference or a plebiscite —
proved to be the final moves in a process of readjustment, the end not the
beginning of an age. For at least thirty years the new status quo in Europe
was as unchallenged and as widely accepted as the pre-1854 situation it
had replaced. Only in the Balkans were frontiers altered or sovereignty
shifted ; even these alterations were forced on the reluctant powers rather
than engineered by them; not even this Eastern Question seriously en-
dangered the peace, though it dominated European relations because the
powers could not escape the complications thrown up by Turkey’s collapse
but could not solve them by agreeing to Turkey’s partition. Beyond
Europe, on the contrary, enormous changes both of frontiers and of
sovereignty were made, changes more rapid and extensive than in any
previous age. They were effected without war or serious risk of war
between the major powers. In these circumstances of great fluidity and
uncharted courses diplomacy proved no less effective, governments no
less cautious, than in the congested and well-trodden paths of the old
continent.
Beyond Europe, as within it, this was basically due to the operation of
the new balance of power between the major European states. New extra-
European powers were arising; they could go to the lengths of formally
declaring war upon another state in the pursuit of their interests, as did
Japan against China in 1894, the United States against Spain in 1898.
But Japan had to be more cautious after her defeat of China, the United
States more cautious in the Far East than in the New World, because until
the 1900’s — until the Spanish- American war itself, from which the United
States, with the seizure of the Philippines and the annexation of Hawaii,
emerged as a Pacific power, and until Russia’s defeat in the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904-5 — most problems beyond Europe except in special
areas like North America, which was sealed off by the Monroe doctrine
and the British Fleet on which that doctrine rested, and Latin America,
where local balances of power developed between the central and the
southern states, were dominated by the European powers. Of those it was
only Great Britain, from her special position, who formally declared war
even upon a smaller state — as against the Boers; or who — as in the
Fashoda crisis — could go to the lengths of openly threatening it against
another great power; or who — as by the occupation of Egypt in 1882 —
could undertake to make a serious alteration in the existing balance of
power. Russia declared war against Turkey in the Near Eastern crisis of
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the i87o’s, though professedly with Christian and European and not with
selfish objects; neither she nor other continental powers subsequently
avoided activity and even fighting beyond Europe. But even in extra-
European contexts, still more within Europe itself, all were restrained from
rash activity — from fighting each other, from formal war with other states,
from gains for themselves which could not be counterbalanced by gains
for the others — by the system of relations which prevailed between them.
Berl in had replaced Vienna and Paris as the centre of that system. The
new Germany was sufficiently powerful to ensure that neither Austria nor
France could change the situation unaided and that neither could get
support in changing it. But these two powers despite their defeat, like
Russia despite her humiliation in the Crimean War, remained great powers
at a time when the gulf between great powers and lesser states had become
enormous. 1 There was no obvious obstacle to their recuperation, their
potentiality was not short of Germany’s, in the eyes of most contempo-
raries — who long expected a French war of revenge against Germany. If
a few contemporaries recognised or feared their relative decline they also
accepted or insisted that Germany would not extend such lead as she had
obtained without great risk — that an attack on any one of the weakened
powers would bring others to its aid. In 1875 Russia and Great Britain,
who had been disinterested spectators of the earlier defeat of Austria and
France, indicated that they would no more tolerate a repetition of the
Franco-Prussian war than they would help to reverse its outcome. Nor
was this the only evidence that the recent changes, far from establishing a
dangerous degree of German preponderance, had freed Europe from the
threat of French domination, which had reappeared with Napoleon III,
without putting German predominance in its place. It was not for nothing
that Bismarck, for all his threats, insisted that Germany was a satiated
state, suffered from nightmares about coalitions and sought the placation
of Russia and Austria and the isolation of France; and not for nothing
that no power, not excluding France who most resented them, seriously
regarded Bismarck’s manoeuvres, and the shift from Paris to Berlin that
made them possible, as being dangerous to the system or to peace.
1 One has only to list the states to see how great this gap was. In 1871 in Europe along-
side Germany, Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Italy there were eleven
lesser powers: Turkey, Spain, Sweden-Norway, Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro. Of these, only Turkey, Spain,
Sweden-Norway and Denmark were fully sovereign. Serbia and Montenegro, though
autonomous, still belonged legally to the Turkish empire. Greece was pledged to follow the
advice of three protecting powers: Russia, Great Britain and France. Belgium was bound
by the treaty of neutrality imposed on her by the great powers in 1839. Switzerland and the
Netherlands were similarly bound by the Congress of Vienna. Portugal was by tradition
allied to Great Britain. Only Roumania (1878) and Bulgaria (1 878-86) were added to these
states before the end of the century. Outside Europe only the United States could be
regarded as of great power rank in 1871, and neither she nor Japan, after her meteoric
rise, can be said to have been incorporated in the international system before the end of the
century.
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It was mainly for these reasons, in a roughly equal distribution of
power and in conditions of general balance, that the powers chose peace
in preference to war. Their situation came close to, though it could not
quite attain, that perfect condition of peace which would exist ‘if every-
where in the world strength dwelt side by side with strength and no weak
and decadent spot remained’. 1 But this situation did more than en-
courage them to revert to the self-restraint of the first half of the nine-
teenth century. It enabled them to continue to subscribe to the principles
on which a sense of the collectivity of the powers, of the Concert of
Europe, had been based in that earlier period. These principles — that
treaties should not be set aside by unilateral action, that gains should not
be made by individual powers without general agreement and, normally,
without compensation for the others, that the great powers had a common
responsibility for the problems of Europe — had inevitably been suspended
during the wars of 1854-71. But since they had never been interpreted
as applying in time of war — regulations for which were also, and not
illogically, part of the accepted public law — they had still limited the
objects of those wars while they were in suspense: the significant
thing about these wars, for all that it said about the explosive force of
the nationalism which partly inspired them, is that the changes they
made were deliberately limited. They also survived the wars: the
continuing tacit acceptance of them was as much the basis of the wide
acceptance of the new status quo and the common determination to keep
the peace after 1871 as was the self-restraint induced by practical con-
siderations arising from the balance of power, though the two factors
buttressed each other. While the balance between the powers checked
dangerous activity this other source of self-restraint was what enabled
the balance to work.
International relations differed in character, nevertheless, from those of
that earlier period of peace after 1815. The balance between the powers,
their common interest in avoiding war, these things kept alive inherited
notions of a public if primitive law; they did not permit a return to, let
alone an extension of, the forms of collaboration in which the Concert
had found expression. Meetings and conferences of the powers, like the
public law itself, had become unworkable during the period of wars from
1854 to 1871; they were not resorted to for the settlements of 1870-1 as
they had been for those of 1856. After 1871 this mechanism was not at
once abandoned. Until the mid-i88o’s the conference method was not
only revived; in response to the fears released by the recent wars there
were efforts to improve upon the scope it had earlier acquired. The
London Conference of 1871 endorsed the Russian denunciation of the
Black Sea clauses. It was, however, endorsed, in accordance with the
principle that no gains should be made without the general agreement of
1 F. Meinecke, Machiavellism, p. 420.
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the great powers, and the Conference also issued a reaffirmation of ‘the
sanctity of treaties In the next crisis engendered by the Eastern Question,
between 1875 and 1878, Russia profited so long as she conformed to the
agreed decisions of the powers. After the Constantinople Conference,
when Turkey failed to reform in accordance with its recommendations, no
power would move to protect her against Russia’s attack. But when
Russia departed from this principle underlying the Concert of Europe,
imposing the Treaty of San Stefano on Turkey, she forfeited the forbear-
ance of the other powers ; and it was Great Britain who, appealing in her
turn to the principle that the Eastern Question was the concern of all the
powers, obtained the outstanding success at the Congress of Berlin in
1878-9. The Congress of Berlin harked back to the Congress of Vienna in
more ways than merely in name. There followed Gladstone’s decision to
place the affairs of Egypt under the supervision of the Concert, after the
British occupation of 1882, and the Berlin Conference on Africa of 1884,
which laid down the rules for the effective occupation of uncivilised lands.
Despite these efforts, however, the practice of regular meetings between
the powers increasingly gave way before an almost universal feeling that
each great power must stand on its own feet — and could stand on its own
feet without bringing the system to disaster. The Berlin Conference on
Africa of 1884 was, except for the abortive Hague Conference of 1899,
the last great international gathering on a political subject for more than
twenty years. Gladstone alone among statesmen continued to advocate
concerted instead of individual action. Bismarck and Lord Salisbury,
with their intellectual contempt for Gladstone’s ideas, were more repre-
sentative of the age.
If these were its representative men, alliances were its typical diplo-
matic means. Agreements between the powers had been imprecise and
temporary during the first half of the nineteenth century — understandings
rather than alliances. Beginning with the Austro-German Alliance of
1879, there grew up a network of written undertakings of a meticulousness
that had gone out with the ancien regime. Every major continental power
came to give and regularly renew formal pledges to some other. Not even
Great Britain, despite her special position, escaped the practice for some
years after 1887 when, in the Mediterranean Agreements, she accepted
a more binding undertaking than was contained in her agreements with
France and Russia twenty years later. These alliances were limited to
European contingencies, though they often restrained, sometimes stimu-
lated and always influenced the European rivalries beyond Europe. The
extra-European powers were not yet involved. In both respects the Anglo-
Japanese alliance of 1902 was the beginning of a new phase in international
relations, an intimation that the search for power and equilibrium was
becoming world-wide and extending beyond the narrow circle of the
European powers.
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It was also the first of all the alliances contracted since 1 879 which, if
only on the Japanese side, was as much concerned with war as with peace,
with changing the status quo as well as with maintaining it. Until then, if
international relations had differed from those of the first half of the
nineteenth century, they were also different from those of the eighteenth
century. Because of the greater determination on peace and because of the
acceptance of a public law with which the eighteenth century had barely
been familiar, the new alliances, unlike those of the ancien regime — and
of the period of wars between 1854 and 1870 — were without exception
defensive. 1 Most of them were explicitly aimed at preserving the status
quo\ the remainder equally lacked the intention of changing it. Not one
of them was an aggressive pact of the kind which had characterised those
other periods and whose primary purpose had been to secure the assistance
or neutrality of another power in a projected war. They were quite unlike
the Pact of Plombieres of 1858, ‘the first definite war plot of the nineteenth
century’, which was a Franco-Italian agreement to find a cause of war;
or the secret treaty of March 1859 between France and Russia providing
for Russian neutrality in the event of a French war with Austria ; or the
Italo-Prussian Alliance of 1866 which was predicated on the assumption
that it would be invalid if war did not break out within three months.
There remained an ironical, if perhaps an unavoidable, contradiction
between the contracting of even defensive alliances and the insistence of
the powers on their autonomy, but of this they were acutely aware. Until
1 The Three Emperors' League of 1873 began as a Russo-German agreement for mutual
aid if one or the other was attacked, and was completed by an Austro-Russian agreement to
consult together if aggression threatened.
The Austro-German Alliance of 1873 was purely defensive, essentially a promise by the
two powers to join together against a Russian attack and to provide benevolent neutrality
in the event of an attack by any other power unaided by Russia.
The Three Emperors' Alliance of 1881 was a defensive alliance. In any war other than
with Turkey, Germany, Russia and Austria promised each other only benevolent neutrality,
while in any war with Turkey they agreed to consult together beforehand and to make no
changes in south-east Europe without agreement. In this last respect it was essentially a
self-denying ordinance imposed by Germany on reluctant Austria and Russia. Also behind
it was the anxiety of all three powers to safeguard existing conquests— Alsace and Lorraine,
Bessarabia and Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Triple Alliance of 1882, an extension of the Austro-German Alliance as a result of the
adhesion of Italy, was essentially defensive. If Italy were attacked by France, Germany and
Austria would assist her. If Germany were attacked by France, Italy would assist her. If
one of the powers were attacked by two or more other powers all would join together. Italy
promised to stay neutral in a war between Russia and Austria. Behind this alliance was the
anxiety to safeguard existing conquests — Italy’s, now joined to those of Germany’s and
Austria’s, being lest those other two powers would support the pope over the papal state.
The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 between Germany and Russia was a promise of neutrality
by the two powers except in the event of a Russian attack on Austria or a German attack on
France, reservations which had always existed and which were now merely formalised.
The Franco- Russian Alliance of 1892-4 arranged that Russia would employ all her forces
against Germany if France were attacked by Germany or by Italy with German support, and
that France would attack Germany if Russia were attacked by Germany or by Austria with
German support.
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the i 89 o’s — in 1891, and prematurely, the Triple Alliance was renewed
for twelve years and the Franco-Russian military convention of 1892
which was the basis of the Franco-Russian Alliance was concluded ‘to
last as long as the Triple Alliance’ — the alliances were all made for
brief periods, usually three or five years , 1 for the same reason that they
dealt meticulously with precise and defensive contingencies : the reluctance
of every power to give up its freedom of action.
After 1890, no less than before, reluctance was the keynote of the
negotiation of each of them. The reluctance of the powers in concluding
the first of the alliances, that between Austria and Germany, is indicated
by the fact that, although it was ‘ secret’, the German emperor insisted on
sending a copy to Russia to prove its defensive character and Austria
notified the British government of its existence. The reluctance of
Austria, Italy and Germany to conclude and renew the Triple Alliance
varied from time to time and as between the three parties, but it was always
a factor in the negotiations. The Franco-Russian Alliance was notoriously
an unwelcome bargain between Russia and France — whose reluctance has
often been mistakenly attributed merely to the mutual distrust of tsardom
and the French Republic. Great Britain at least was most reluctant to
conclude the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, and this would have been
an Anglo-German-Japanese Alliance had not Germany been determined
to stay free. Partly because of this reluctance, though they were all
technically secret alliances, their existence and often their contents were
generally known to all the foreign offices . 2 Being precise, short-term and
technically secret they left the powers free, as they were intended to do,
in all but the stated and narrow contingencies they envisaged. The powers
used this freedom. It would be an exaggeration to assert that the system of
alliances was a fasade, ignored except on ceremonial occasions and by
gullible persons. It is certain that its nature cannot be understood unless
it is emphasised that it was no barrier either to understandings between
1 Whereas no term had been set to the Three Emperors’ League of 1873 — which was an
understanding of the old style, a revival of the Holy Alliance or, rather, of the understandings
of pre-1854 — all alliances after 1879 were deliberately short-term— three or five years, and
occasionally ten, as in the Austro-Serbian Alliance of 1881 — but were renewable.
The Austro-German Alliance of 1879 was concluded in the first place for five years and
renewed at five-year intervals.
The Three Emperors' Alliance of 1881 was for three years and was renewed in 1884 and
expired in 1887.
The Triple Alliance of 1882 was for five years, and was renewed for five years in 1887; but
in 1891, and prematurely, it was renewed for twelve years.
The Austro-German-Roumanian Alliance of 1883 was for five years and renewed at frequent
intervals.
The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 was for three years. It expired in 1890.
s Parts of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance were published — but it had its secret clauses.
Until then the alliances had been secret. Insufficient research has as yet been done on the
extent to which, despite this fact, their contents were known. It is clear that on the whole
they were.
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members of opposed alliances — between Austria and Russia, France and
Germany, Germany and Russia, Italy and France — or to disagreements
between allies — between Italy and Austria, France and Russia, Austria
and Germany. Any power tempted to adventure was restrained by its
allies as much as by its opponents. Bismarck went far towards contracting
incompatible alliances with Austria and Russia, with Italy and Austria.
There were times when the British government did not remember that it
had signed the Mediterranean Agreements or could not decide whether or
not the agreements had lapsed. All the powers sought to be as isolationist
in fact as Great Britain was normally able to be. Their alliances testified
to their wish for independence as much as to the difficulty of achiev-
ing it.
This difficulty was perhaps inherent in the existence of suspicious
sovereign states. It was increased by the stupendous development which
now took place in the weapons and techniques of war. The Austro-
German Alliance took its rise from Bismarck’s determination to preserve
the advantageous status quo of 1871, from his fear that another European
war could not be localised and might end in the weakening or dismember-
ment of Germany. Against this danger he relied on Germany’s military
preparedness as well as on diplomacy. But just as the first alliance in-
exorably led to others, so military preparedness increasingly involved the
need of an ally. The application of science, technology and industry to the
means of war, and of the increasing efficiency and bureaucracy of the state
to military organisation, was making continuous readiness, rapid mobi-
lisation, large forces and universal conscription essential for success in
resisting an attack with modern transport and modem weapons. All the
leading continental states, following Germany’s example in these direc-
tions, became for the first time nations in arms in time of peace. On the
other hand, the greatest single consequence of these developments was
that weapon development, which had moved in advance of improvements
in locomotion and made tactics increasingly static since the sixteenth
century, now moved farther ahead of them than ever before. Weapon
ranges, which were ten times greater in 1870 than in the days of the first
Napoleon, were forty times greater by 1898. Weapon efficiency similarly
shot forward, especially with the development of machine-guns in the
1860’s and of Maxim’s truly automatic machine-gun in 1 889. But mobility
and flexibility on the battlefield — as opposed to the increased strategic
mobility resulting from the growth of railways — was reduced by the
introduction of larger weapons until the subsequent application of the
petrol engine to warfare, which did not come before 1914. More than
ever before, battlefield mobility and weapon power had become incom-
patible. This was the great difference between naval and military develop-
ments at this time. Navies gained in speed and mobility, as well as in
weapon power, because of the much earlier development of propulsion
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at sea compared with that of automotive power on land — and so much so
that the difficulty with them, as was shown in the war of 1914, was
becoming that of bringing an enemy fleet to battle at all.
Success in a land attack against a prepared enemy, if not rendered
quite impossible, accordingly required an ever-increasing ratio of
superiority by the attack over the defence. When all the powers were in
any case prepared, when technical developments were constantly in-
creasing the expense and the rate of obsolescence of weapons, when
increasingly complex and efficient general staffs planned — as was their
habit and, in view of the lack of tactical mobility, to some extent a con-
tinuing need — for frontal assaults and — as was their function — for victory
and not merely for successful defence, and at a time when governments
were also spending increasing amounts on education, welfare and other
social measures, the burden became so great, both financially and psycho-
logically, that the powers felt forced to contract alliances. If these all
dealt with precise contingencies it was in the details of mutual military aid
that they reached the greatest precision. By 1892 this fact had become so
pronounced that what in due course became the Franco-Russian Alliance
originated in a strictly military convention, made to balance the military
forces of the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy, between two
powers who had no intention of concerting their policies and entered no
commitment to concert them.
If only because they were so directly necessitated by the armaments
situation, the alliances, while they accentuated the defensive character of
the age by presenting the powers with the choice of only a general war or
a general peace, did nothing, indeed, to offset the central characteristic
of its international dealings — the ultimate self-reliance of each power.
Bismarck initiated the alliance network because his alliances, whatever
their eventual effect, increased his control of international politics. As the
deadlock in Europe grew more complete, and particularly after 1892, it
encouraged the powers to search for compensating advantages and lever-
age effect beyond the continent, thus intensifying their colonial activities.
Russia increasingly turned to Persia and north China; France to south
China and Africa; Italy to Africa; Austria and Germany in the Turkish
direction. These activities occupied forces that were negligible compared
with the effort and preoccupation applied to preserving the balance in
Europe. As yet, and until Russia overreached herself in the preliminaries
to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, they were always subordinated —
though sometimes, and with growing frequency, only after they had pro-
duced an international crisis — to the maintenance of that balance and of
peace. But they were not subordinated to the wishes or interests of
European allies. It was the increase of these independent activities,
cutting across alliances which dealt with purely European contingencies,
that contributed most to the growing interpenetration of the alliances
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INTRODUCTION
after 1892. At the end of the period, when they had already introduced —
with the Kruger telegram, the Fashoda crisis, the scramble for China — an
additional source of stress in international relations, Russia, the first
power to find the armaments burden crippling, proposed the Hague Con-
ference for the discussion of excessive armaments and of means to preserve
the peace. Though all the invited governments consented to attend, none,
in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, took the conference ‘too seriously’ and all
agreed with the German emperor that it was ‘utopian’. These problems
were not seen as problems requiring the revival of the old Concert
machinery or — beyond the establishment of a purely voluntary court of
arbitration, and even this step all but precipitated the resignation of von
Holstein from the key position he had held in the German foreign office —
the adoption of any new form of international co-operation. Govern-
ments apart, there was a pronounced increase of concern with the pro-
blem of war prevention during the 1890’s, but the prevailing view, as
represented by Nobel, Carnegie, D’Estoumelles and Ivan Bloch, was still
that progressive governments could solve the problem by concerted action
and without the need for that complicated international machinery and
that limitation of sovereignty which had been advocated earlier, during
the eighteenth century, and was to be advocated again, with appeals to
the eighteenth century, in the twentieth century.
This continuing confidence of the powers in their ability to work
without machinery was, like the earlier eclipse of the Concert itself, a
reflection of the most significant developments of the time. It is all the
more noticeable in that it was precisely when they were becoming out-
moded in other directions (and by the growth of international administra-
tive dealings as much as by developments within the states) that the prin-
ciples of laissez-faire were reasserted in this way as the basis of interna-
tional political relations. It is estimated that the numbers of international
unions or conventions for such matters increased from twenty between
1878 and 1880, to thirty-one in the 1880’s, sixty-one in the 1890’s and
108 between 1900 and 1904). It was when freedom and individualism were
giving way to regulation and organisation in domestic affairs, and also
when the world was necessarily experiencing the first huge proliferation of
international legislation and committees on administrative and technical
matters of common concern to the states like postage, telegraphs and
public health, that the states insisted as never before on autonomy in
international politics ; that they began to rely as exclusively as possible on
the operation of a balance between themselves for control of the inter-
national position; that they came to believe that in foreign affairs, as in
such matters as tariffs, the maximum liberty for each would automatically
produce the best results for all. The same developments which underlay
the growth of internal organisation and of international law and admini-
stration — the extension of the functions and competence of government
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and the alteration of the relations of each government to its society — had
this apparently contradictory consequence for international relations.
They were bringing states into closer and more continuous contact with
each other — even as they were making them more similar to each other in
organisation — but they were simultaneously emphasising their political
individuality and putting a strain on their political solidarity.
The decline of monarchical solidarity was a symptom rather than a
cause of this change. Up to the i 870’ s , however attenuated, this had
remained as a general sentiment on which the arch of a Concert system
could rest among governments who were all on guard, if in different
degrees, against internal dissidence. It now declined, and what took the
place of monarchism or dynasticism was not a new loyalty uniting govern-
ments but a new conception of the state in accordance with which each
government was rather ranged with its own society than with other
governments against it. The heightening everywhere of the emotional
attachment towards the armed forces as symbols of the national state was
only one indication of this process. Nationalism itself underwent a
change. Except in central and eastern Europe, which for the time at
least became the only considerable area where nationalist feeling was both
strong and unsatisfied, loyalty to the nation gave way to loyalty to the
state among the general populations. In that area national movements
which opposed established governments were now more easily repressed.
It had always been true that such movements had usually succeeded only
where embraced by a strong government and favoured by other govern-
ments; they were now handicapped by the greater resources of state
power and by the fact that governments themselves, and not least the
governments of Germany and Italy which had previously profited from
the national principle, became intensely nationalist in their policies within
existing borders. The Congress of Berlin ignored the principle of nation-
ality even more than it had been ignored by the Congress of Vienna.
Turkey was deprived of half her European territory; but for the purpose
of rounding off the territories of the powers and in the interests of the
balance between them, and not in the cause of freeing national minorities.
How could there be sympathy, let alone support, for Czechs or Poles or
Serbs or Balts when — all other considerations apart — governments within
their own states were, with wide popular support, favouring national
majorities and making intense efforts to create homogeneous populations
by absorbing minorities; when the German government was Germanising
Poles and Danes, when centralism in Italy no less than in Austria was
ignoring minorities and provincialism, when Russification was as ruthless
as Magyarisation and more extensive? Even in England Gladstone was
discovering that public sentiment was stubbornly opposed to his plan
for Home Rule for Ireland, and even in small states — in Belgium, for
example, where the ascendancy of the French over the Flemish element
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INTRODUCTION
was steadily developed — the governments equally pursued a policy of
administrative centralisation and national unification.
This shift, with its accompanying increase in the concern of govern-
ments to limit the responsibilities and to guard the security of their own
states, made governments reluctant to invoke the conference method even
in political disputes which were of interest to them all. It was not only in
the Eastern Question and not only by Bismarck that, increasingly after
the 1870’s, such trouble and risk were regarded as unworthy of the bones
of a grenadier. In such an atmosphere it was the more certain that the
efforts of men like Gladstone not merely to revive the Concert but to
extend it, to convert it back to a Congress system, would only contribute
to its collapse. But the problems which Gladstone tried to submit to it —
the internal administration of Egypt, the reform or dissolution of the
Ottoman empire, the opening-up of Africa — illustrate the importance of
another development that was working in the same direction. If govern-
ments were more reluctant than before to collaborate in the settlement of
even common problems it was also true that an increasing number of
international political problems were not of common, or at least of equal,
concern to a structure of purely European powers. At the same time, for
all the continuing primacy of those powers, some problems were arising
which were not the concern of European powers alone. The political
problems of this period, to a larger extent than ever before, arose in areas
beyond Europe in which, for both of these reasons, the conditions did not
exist for the application of a European concert machinery or even —
despite the effort to apply them there in the 1884 Conference on Africa
and the international guarantee of the status of the Congo Free State —
of those general notions of a European public law on which such
machinery had once been based.
This second development was the direct consequence of two others.
The discrepancy between the developed and the undeveloped parts of the
world was becoming acute. It was becoming acute at a time when the
world beyond Europe was shrinking with the enormous development of
communications, and at a time when the possibilities of exploiting un-
developed areas were being vastly enlarged by this and other technical and
organisational developments. On account of the different circumstances
and different previous histories of the different parts of the world the
industrial and technical revolutions and the rise of the modern state, such
prominent features of this period wherever they did occur, did not take
place everywhere — any more than, where they did take place, they took
place to the same degree and at the same speed — but only in some
countries. The effects on international relations were momentous. Not
only were new powers emerging for the first time beyond Europe. Not for
the first time, for there had been a growing disparity between western
Europe and other areas since the eighteenth century, yet more rapidly,
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more extensively and more directly than before, the more developed
states extended, were perhaps unable to avoid extending, their intervention
and their control in areas where society and government were still as
they had been in the European Middle Ages. This happened in Turkey’s
European provinces and in Central Asia from about 1870; in Turkey’s
North African possessions, in the Near East and Persia, in undeveloped
Africa and the undeveloped Pacific from about 1880; in China and Korea
from about 1885 ; in the New World, even, from about 1890 as the United
States expanded from her continent into the Caribbean, undertook the
Panama Canal and asserted her right under the Monroe Doctrine to be
the directing power in South as well as in North America. And when none
of the problems of this wider world of politics involved all the European
powers, when few of them affected even those powers in equal degree,
when some of them were more directly the concern of new powers beyond
Europe than they were of some European states, it is not to be wondered
at that these developments confirmed the impossibility of upholding an
older and purely European habit and system of collaboration, or that,
notwithstanding the attendance of the United States, Japan, China,
Siam and Mexico as well as of European states at the Hague Conference,
they also did nothing to encourage the growth of a wider system.
Whatever further elaboration may be needed for a complete analysis,
these developments were the sufficient cause of the increase in imperialist
activity and imperialist sentiment which marked the last fifteen or twenty
years of the century. This imperialism derived much of its character, and
no doubt further impetus, from the special economic conditions of the
Great Depression and the international situation in Europe on the one
hand or from increased humanitarianism and missionary activity on the
other. The age was one of constantly growing missionary activity by the
Christian churches. This was facilitated by material developments — the
growth of transport, the development of cheap printing, the improving
control of diseases, the growing wealth in Western countries which gave
growing financial assistance to this work — whatever it owed to continuing
and perhaps increasing dedication to the work of spreading the gospel and
tending the backward. The White Fathers were founded by Lavigerie in
the 1870’s. The Cambridge University mission to China was inaugurated
in 1885. There followed a multiplication of Catholic and Protestant
missions all over the world. By 1900 the army of Christian missionaries
in Africa, Asia and the Pacific was comparable in size with the overseas
military forces of any of the great powers, comprising (including native
priests) more than 41,000 Catholics, 18,000 Protestants, 2000 Orthodox.
Their activities undoubtedly stimulated imperialist sentiment both by
stimulating public interest in overseas expansion and in more direct ways.
But if imperialism now surpassed that of earlier periods in intensity, it was
mainly because the disparity between the efficient and the undeveloped
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INTRODUCTION
areas of the world was becoming more pronounced at a time when the
possibilities of expansion and exploitation by the efficient areas were
growing more rapidly than they had ever grown. Colonial expansion was
at least more extensive than before on this account, and was indulged in
by a wider circle of powers.
It is tempting to assume that this fact increased, as it is tempting to
assume that the armaments preparations, the alliances and the tariff wars
of the period increased, the suspicion and strain of international relations.
It is equally arguable that suspicion and strain are necessary ingredients in
the relations between sovereign states and that imperialism was as much
checked as it was accelerated, as these other manifestations were contained
as well as encouraged, by the rivalry of the powers. Certainly if inter-
national tension was any greater in 1900 than in 1870, a contention which
few contemporaries would have accepted, it was so for a more basic reason
than the imperialism, the alliances, the armaments and the economic
policies of the powers. The balance between the powers was itself changing
and with it the objects of their rivalry.
As the period ended, a period which had been distinguished by an
obvious and ever-growing disparity between the developed and the un-
developed states, another disparity was becoming acute — a disparity
between the more developed states, the powers, themselves. It had been
emerging since the 1860’s and i87o’s. The unification of Germany, the end
of the American Civil War, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the Meiji
revolution and, in 1877, the defeat of the last feudal rebellion in Japan,
these developments had already laid at that time the foundation of a
different international system from that which had so far prevailed in
modem times. Until the end of the century — though work was proceeding
fast on these foundations, and faster in Germany than elsewhere; though
other states. Great Britain and France, who had developed most before
1870, were losing their earlier lead; though others yet, like Austria and
Italy, found themselves limited in opportunities and the resources of
modern power — the shift in relative strengths had not been rapid or
obvious, and it had been overlaid by the checks and balances of the older
international order. The older order had still persisted alongside the new.
Germany was already stronger than France, the next powerful continental
state, in 1870, with more than twice the coal production and nearly twice
the output of iron; she was stronger still after her defeat of France in 1871 ;
she had forged steadily ahead of France and the other continental powers
thereafter. But until 1890 she had remained below Great Britain in
material strength and had not yet passed beyond the resources of a com-
bination of the European powers. By the 1900’s, however, Germany was
approaching a degree of material primacy within Europe which no
continental power had possessed since 1815 and which checks and balances
could no longer disguise. For ten years, and especially since the end
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of depression conditions in 1895-6, she had been rapidly increasing her
lead in industrial production over every other European state except
Great Britain. With Great Britain she was rapidly drawing level, and in
some important respects she had acquired a lead. In steel production, for
example, while the United States had replaced Great Britain as the world’s
greatest producer by the mid-i88o’s, Germany had taken second place by
1900, when the United States had one-quarter of the world’s production,
Germany a fifth and Great Britain less than a sixth. Germany produced
7-4 million tons, Great Britain 6 million; France, by contrast, produced
1 -9 million tons. By the same date her population had surpassed that of
every European state except Russia. On the other hand, while her popula-
tion stood at 56 millions and her birth-rate, like that of most of western
Europe, was beginning to fall, the most significant changes in population
since the 1870’s were those which had raised Russia from 72 to 116
millions and brought the United States to nearly 80 millions. More
serious still, it was in the 1890’s that Russia, although still undeveloped,
and the United States, after relatively slow advance hitherto, had begun
to experience that rate of industrial and technological growth which
Germany had experienced for thirty years. Which of these considerations
had more weight with her, her present eminence or the thought that the
time in which she could use it would be limited, is not easy to decide.
What need not be doubted is that she became influenced by both.
Since 1871, despite her lead over some individual powers in some
directions, she had been concerned with her immediate weakness. She
now began to be alarmed by her ultimate danger and to reflect on her
immediate strength. Beginning in the late 1890’s her policy, hitherto
cautious, began to acquire an erratic and unstable quality, her interests,
hitherto focused on Europe and on her army, encouraged her to combine
Europe with empire and to add a naval to her military effort. Her policy
roused the fears and provoked the retaliation of the other powers — as her
growing relative power might alone have done in due course — from the
early 1900’s. In the ensuing struggle and in a new phase of international
history — a phase which was to last till 1945 and in which grave and
shifting inequality in the distribution of effective power between the
leading states of the world replaced the previous balance between states
in Europe — Germany sought the mastery of Europe as no power had
sought it for a century, and all the powers at last set aside those principles
and that sense of their collectivity which, despite the breakdown of the
Concert itself, had helped to restrain them in the last third of the nineteenth
century. Despite many subsequent experiments in international organisa-
tion, they have not yet been restored.
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ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
A brupt change is not characteristic of the economic process in
/A history. In most respects even the nineteenth-century world was
1 Aworking out, on a much larger scale, the logic of methods inherited
from an earlier age. What distinguished the nineteenth century increas-
ingly from earlier centuries and explains the pace, rhythm and scale of its
economic growth was the extent to which international trade and invest-
ment came to transmit the very means of economic change themselves
from the forward to the backward areas. The sale, or more often the loan,
of capital equipment — railways, engines, rolling-stock, mining gear,
pumps, machinery — accelerated the rate at which the economic arrange-
ments and social structures of the less advanced nations were transformed.
As trade came to imply not only the exchange of goods, but the permanent
nexus of investment, a new type of politico-economic relationship
emerged, rich in material promise and heavy with political risk. Much of
the foreign trade of Britain, still the leading economic power in most
respects in 1900, rested upon contracts designed (in the most simplified
terms) to enable nations which could not afford to pay for capital equip-
ment on current account to borrow it. The supposition underlying these
transactions was that the opportunities they created would enable the
borrower to pay a return to the lender.
This phenomenon was not new in 1870; but it owed its new prominence
to the period of railway building which had begun in continental Europe
before the mid-century. This was still going on vigorously in the fourth
quarter, both through new construction and the replacement of old iron
track by steel. As the leading iron producer and the pioneer of rail techno-
logy, Britain had become the leading exporter of men and materials for
world construction. The British ironmaster made the track and rolling
stock, the British contractor frequently built the road, the British investor
lent the money to build it. Sometimes the functions were combined.
Nothing illustrates more clearly the nature of the so-called ‘ emigration of
capital’ than the willingness of South Wales ironmasters of the mid-
century to accept part payment for their export of iron rails to North
America in bonds of the railway company that was purchasing the con-
signment. Only thus could Britain trade with customers full of promise
but short of cash. By 1900 Britain’s accumulated hoard of capital in the
outside world stood at somewhere between two and two and a half
billion sterling. Perhaps a fifth of this was represented by North American
railway investment. What proportion was held in railways elsewhere — in
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India, South America, the Near East in particular — is less certain, but it
was undoubtedly very large. The equipment and exploitation of mines,
gas, water, tramway and telephone and cable enterprises also played a
large role in developing the system of international capital lending.
This system itself and the goods and services it enabled to be lent and
borrowed were an increasingly potent force for change. Mercantilist
thinkers had never dissembled their anxiety at the results of allowing
potential competitors to buy or borrow the tools and machines on which
Britain’s early industrial — essentially textile — prowess was founded. Yet
the railway was a far more powerful agent of change than the spinning-
jenny or the steam-loom. Here, in the technology of transport, lay the
foundations of material progress and ultimately of social and political
change. Its immediate impact was disturbing, not least on the economy
of the great universal provider of capital herself. Within a decade or two
of 1870, Britain saw her relationships with America and Europe revolu-
tionised by the changes wrought in their economies through the operation
of her own capital and inventions.
The United States economy was transformed between 1870 and 1900,
as the greatest producer of foodstuffs and raw material became also a
manufacturer of the first rank. The percentage of Americans who worked
in industry and transport came in these years to exceed the numbers who
worked on farms. There were mining towns in West Virginia, engineering
towns in New England, iron towns in Pennsylvania. By 1900 one-third of
the American people lived in such towns, and their numbers were growing
faster than those of the people as a whole. The masters of this new
industrial society were the tycoons, the ‘robber barons’ of American
political folk mythology, whose vigorous but often ruthless enterprise has
created those ambiguous figures of American folk-lore, half hero, half
villain — the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, Hills, Morgans, Camegies and
the rest. It was no accident that many of them made their fantastic
fortunes directly or indirectly out of railways, for it was the railway that
made the new America possible; nor that J. P. Morgan’s career began
with his family’s London connection and reached its climax through his
determination to preserve his firm’s reputation with the British investors
who owned well over half the six billion dollars’ worth of foreign capital
invested in the United States. Increasingly after 1 873, the North American
railway system was made of Bessemer steel. Lake Superior ores, accessible
now by rail to furnaces a third of a continent away, were transported to
the new converters. By 1886, and with the use of basically British inven-
tions, the United States had replaced Britain as the world’s greatest steel
producer. American manufacturers of steel, as of so many other products,
were showing a willingness to scrap old plant and invest in new in a way
that made them as conspicuous a nation of consumers of capital as they
were already reputed to be of other commodities.
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In Europe too the main railway system was completed by 1870. The
Pyrenees had been turned at both ends, the Alps pierced and crossed.
Even Russia had built over 10,000 miles of track. During the next two
or three decades the process continued, the density of the European rail
network increased, and new links were forged — vital tunnels like St
Gotthard and Simplon, the long hauls to Constantinople, Salonica, and
Vladivostok. 1 The year 1900 marked the completion of the Siberian rail-
way which was begun from the European end in 1891 ; nearly 4000 miles
of track built at a cost of a hundred million pounds by state enterprise.
Like that of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the railways of the United
States, its function was to link east and west, open a warm-water port, and
join Atlantic with Pacific. It was typical that Russia, farthest east and
least economically and socially advanced of the major countries, should
by the end of the century have been building fastest of all, st im ulated not
only by the neo-mercantilist aspirations of ministers like Count Witte but
by the opposition to Western institutions and ideas that was common to
Slavophil and Pan-Slavist, to whom the railway system was a means of
freeing Russia from Western ties. By a curious irony, it served only to
bind her more closely to her Western neighbours. Their rail systems were
likewise expanding. Belgium remained the best-served country in Europe :
Italy, Spain, Holland and Switzerland entered the family of railway states.
Germany added some 30,000 kilometres of track : France some 25,000.
The German railway system was impressive evidence of the rapid accu-
mulation of capital in Germany. By 1 875 a growing population — including
labour made redundant by the decay of rural industry — helped to make
construction relatively cheap. French misfortune was joined to German
thrift. ‘You may say ’, a German economist wrote in 1903, ‘ that by way of
war indemnity France finished off our main railway network for us.’ The
industrial foundations for this tremendous advance in transport were
firmly and rapidly laid in the i87o’s and 1880’s. More iron and engineer-
ing businesses were set up in Prussia in the four boom years that followed
Sedan than in all the previous years of the century. But the great leap
forward came in the i88o’s: and Germany owed it to a young London
chemist called Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who, with his cousin P. C.
Gilchrist, discovered a method for eliminating phosphorus from iron used
in steel-making. This was the problem that had defeated Bessemer and
Siemens. The Gilchrist-Thomas process opened the door to a vast expan-
sion of steel manufacture based on the ores of Alsace-Lorraine, taken
from France in 1871 but hitherto unusable because of the phosphorus
they contained. Henceforth, an increasing proportion of Europe’s iron
and steel came from this ore bed and from the coke of the Ruhr. While
1 Increase of length of track in Europe:
i860 1870 1880 1890 1900
km. 51,900 104,900 169,000 224,000 283,500
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British steel output rose from 3-7 million tons in 1880 to just under
6 million tons in 1900, and French from 1-4 to 1-9 million tons, German
output rose from 1 -5 to 7-4 million tons and was to rise even more rapidly
thereafter. This in turn formed the basis for a superstructure of metal-
lurgical industries of every kind: by 1900 Germany had already con-
structed for herself a steel-built steam tonnage for her mercantile marine
of nearly i-j- million tons. This too was a measure of progress since the
i87o’s when Germany had less steam tonnage than France or even Spain.
The material progress down to the 1 88o’s had in one respect owed less
to the twin technologies of metallurgy and power than has sometimes been
supposed. The Golden Age of sail lay in the years between the Great
Exhibition of 1851 and the depression of the late 1880’s. This, the mid-
Victorian boom, was the time of the highest efficiency of the sailing
ship, fighting hard to retain its supremacy against the powered ship, still
hindered by unsolved technical problems. Even the iron ship was still
proving expensive to operate because of the delays imposed on her by the
fouling of the ship’s bottom and the cost of cleaning it. Accordingly the
coppered wooden sailing-ship retained much of her attraction. In 1870
the sailing tonnage of the United Kingdom was still 4 i million tons, as
compared with just over a million tons of steam/iron shipping. Sail
continued to convey goods of great bulk — iron, coal, jute, rice, wool,
wheat, nitrates — on their journeys half-way round the world. Even when
the railway had in the 1870’s opened up the prairies of the Mid-West
nearly all the grain and guano and the return cargoes of coal crossed the
Atlantic under sail. In 1882 more than 500 sailing-ships, nearly all
British, were carrying grain from the west coast of the United States to
Europe, though by this time new designs giving double the cargo space of
the 1850’s made it economic to build them of iron and equip them with
steel masts. From the 1860’s, the problems posed by the higher pressures
needed in marine engines if these were to compete effectively with sail
were being investigated. They were not solved till the later 1870’s and early
1880’s when improved steel boilers and tubes enabled shipbuilders to con-
struct ships with triple expansion engines that worked at 1 50 lb. pressure
and more. The launching of the S.S. Aberdeen at Glasgow in 1881 for the
Aberdeen White Star Line marked the beginning of the end of the
obstinate rivalry of sail. In 1883, British steam tonnage came to equal that
of sail. Ten years later the same was true of world tonnage.
The growing efficiency of the marine engine was aided by other develop-
ments. The largest was the Suez Canal which cut the distance from
western Europe to China by 3000 miles. Here, as so often, the inspiration
and conception was French, though others benefited more than France by
the vision and courage of de Lesseps. Sir Charles Dilke’s forecast that
France would find she had ‘ spent millions on digging a canal for England’s
use’ proved not far wide of the mark. Seven years after it was opened by
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the Empress Eugenie in 1869 — a triumph for French prestige celebrated by
a performance of Aida, specially written for the occasion — the British
government became the principal shareholder through Disraeli’s op-
portune purchase of the khedive’s holding. Thereafter, it was used mainly
by British ships until the twentieth century. The great new ships called
also for harbour and dock improvements demanding vast capital invest-
ment — deeper channels, larger wharves, bigger warehouses, dredgers,
cranes and elevators. In 1872 Caland, the Rotterdam engineer, built the
New Waterway connecting Rotterdam directly to the North Sea. The Kiel
Canal, linking the North Sea with the Baltic, was constructed between
1887 and 1895. The Manchester ‘Ship Canal’ followed in 1894. These
were workaday affairs compared with Suez, but in the life of western
Europe they were vital to the task of easing and stimulating the flow of
goods.
No less important in the linking of world markets was the submarine
cable. Here again the main ownership was British — even in 1900 more
than three-fifths of the world’s ocean cables were British owned— but the
original invention owed as much to Germany as it did to Britain. The
leading figure, both scientifically and commercially, was William Siemens,
an immigrant German of farming stock from the Harz Mountains, one of
the outstanding pupils of the German system of technical education, who
came to England in 1843 as agent for the family business. Siemens was
one of a number of German scientists who made their mark on the British
economy in the nineteenth century. By 1863 he had established his sub-
marine-cable works at Woolwich, and while de Lesseps was opening Suez
Siemens was laying his first oceanic cables. In 1871 the Indo-European
cable running from Lowestoft under the North Sea to Germany and
through the Middle East via Teheran to India was completed. By 1874
five cables had been laid across the Atlantic. By the time Siemens died in
1883 the firm of Siemens Brothers had made and laid nearly 13,000 miles
of major submarine cable — enough to go more than half-way round the
world.
Invention and technology, especially in the sphere of power and metal-
lurgy ; the growth of transport on land and sea with its ancillary systems of
communications ; and the apparatus of international capital investment —
these were the influences that revolutionised the character and volume of
world trade. Some of them were at work by the mid-century and even
earlier: but it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that their
combined force was brought to bear upon the economic life of Europe and
the world beyond. No single generalisation or statistical cross-cut will
convey the full effects of changes that penetrated deeply into the political
and social as well as the economic habits of the late-Victorian world.
Among the most illuminating are the figures for the increase of inter-
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national trade. In the thirty years after the mid- 1870’s the gold value of
world trade probably rather more than doubled. Allowing for the fall in
prices its volume may well have trebled.
Moreover, the nature of this trade, as well as its volume, was changing.
The international trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had
been preponderantly in textiles. Even in 1900, cottons and woollens and
other textiles were still the largest single group of items on Britain’s export
list. But since 1870 they had been declining in value both absolutely and
relatively to the export of metals and machinery. To some extent this shift
reflected problems peculiar to the British economy — the impact of tariffs
and the rivalry of the new industrial nations. But it was also a sign of the
times. Germany’s exports of iron and steel, and of goods and machinery
made of iron and steel, had exceeded Britain’s by 1900. The fact was that
the new transport had made foreign trade, an unimportant element in the
life of most European nations in the first half of the nineteenth century, an
indispensable element by 1900. Goods of great bulk could now be moved
over great distances with ease. A division of labour had accordingly
developed between the central bloc of European manufacturing nations
and a distant ring of primary producers — the southern states of the
United States, the Mid-West prairies, India, Malaya, China, Australia,
New Zealand, and Russia, all contributing supplies of food or raw
materials to Europe by the 1880’s. France had become dependent on
foreign suppliers for one-third of her coal; Germany for very nearly the
whole of her raw wool; England for four-fifths of her wheat. All three
relied on foreign trade to supply and pay for the whole of their imports of
cotton, rubber, jute, rice and practically all their tin, copper and mineral
oils. Britain was most dependent on imported food, but France and
Germany were following in her wake and even the United States was
tending more and more to balance her food exports with food imports.
Germany doubled the value of her food imports between the 1 88o’s and
the 1890’s. There was this difference between Britain and the rest: she
bought essential foods — wheat especially — whereas the others bought a
larger proportion of luxuries which could, at a pinch, be eliminated. The
dependence of Britain, France and Germany on imported raw materials
for industry was growing rapidly.
This division of labour between manufacturer and primary producer
emphasised increasingly the reliance of the industrialised nations on the
tropical and sub-tropical lands. These were no longer peripheral, visited
occasionally by the European trader, and dispatching their cargoes to the
West only at annual intervals. Just as the annual fair of the Middle Ages
had given place to the entrepot of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
so the entrepot, with its more frequent but still only spasmodic bursts of
activity in furs, spices, fine cloths, wine and so on, now yielded to a flow
of international trade that was very nearly continuous through the year.
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Harvests might still influence prices, and winter dictate the movements of
shipping on the rivers and estuaries of Canada and Russia : but in general
the flow of trade was no longer governed by Nature as it had once been.
Moreover, over a long period, as will be seen, capital investment tended to
reduce the gaps between the values of exports and imports, and to induce
a high degree of reciprocity which made the problems of international pay-
ment easier. The spread of commercial banking, much of it managed from
London, reduced the importance of the precious metals as a means of
settling obligations. Bullion and coin had come to be very largely the final
reserves of the banker : specie flowed in payment of international balances
only as a last resort, usually when something had gone radically wrong.
When trade was following its normal course and was not upset by war,
rumours of war, or urgent crisis, the movement of gold and silver was
reduced to a trickle. Increasingly the London banks helped to finance
transactions between buyers and sellers half a world away in commodities
which never came near Europe.
The rising tide of commodities that flowed in the wake of overseas
capital investment and the services that eased its movement, in the pro-
vision of both of which, while she continued to lead, Great Britain was
now joined by Germany and France, created a new phenomenon: a world
market governed by world prices. It also created new problems of pay-
ment. Areas of trade previously more or less self-contained — like the
Britain-India-China trade — dissolved into a wider world economy as
China, India and Japan began to sell in world markets. The central pivot
of the world payments mechanism was Britain’s ability to maintain a
deficit on her visible trade with one half of the world which she balanced
by means of a surplus with the other half. From the 1880’s her deficit
with the United States rose steadily as the rich natural resources of North
America were fertilised. America’s deficits in Europe and Asia were paid
for by Britain ; America’s growing balances with Canada and the Argentine
financed her imports from Brazil and India. Britain had other large
deficits in addition to that with the United States. As capital investment
fructified and production and exports increased (for example, in the
Argentine, which from the 1890’s converted its unfavourable balance of
trade with Britain into a favourable one), the new nations frequently spent
their balances not with Britain but with other manufacturing nations. In
turn, as Britain saw her trading surpluses — with North and South
America, Europe and the Dominions — disappear, and as tariffs and com-
petition made it more difficult to export British manufactures abroad, she
came to rely increasingly on the favourable balances she still maintained
with the less developed countries — Turkey, Japan, but above all India—
to settle her deficits in Europe and America. It has been said that it was in
the last three or four decades before 1914 that Britain made her most vital
contribution to the smooth functioning of the world economy by keeping
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her doors wide open to the imports coming from the rest of the world.
The key to Britain’s multilateral pattern of world payments came increas-
ingly to lie in her economic relations with India, whose exports to Europe
and the United States helped to finance her deficit with Britain. In this way
Britain’s surplus with India was probably financing as much as two-thirds
of Britain’s total deficit with other nations by 1900. The value of this
multilateral system to world trade was immense and — in spite of a rising
demand for tariff reform — its beneficiaries undoubtedly included many
British exporting interests : by enabling other industrial nations to obtain
their food and raw materials without having to pay for them bilaterally
by manufactured exports, it relieved British manufacturers of possible
competition in their non-European markets. It could be argued that
almost everybody — save only the British farmer — benefited to some
degree. The principal mechanism by which the obligations arising from
this world trading system were settled was centred in London, which
accepted for payment bills drawn on buyers in every continent. Nothing
symbolised more vividly the new world economic order than the pay-
ment of Peking’s war indemnity to Tokyo in 1894 through the Bank of
England.
Within the expanding total of world trade, a marked change was taking
place in the balance of economic power, especially in the last twenty years
of the century. Great Britain experienced a decline from the unchallenged
supremacy of 1870 to a primacy, challenged but in many respects main-
tained, in 1900. Between 1880 and 1900 Britain’s share fell from 25 to
2 1 per cent, France’s share from 1 1 to 8 per cent. Contrariwise, Germany’s
share rose from 9 to 12 per cent and the United States’ share from 10 to
1 1 per cent. Reckoning the value of foreign trade, contemporaries con-
cluded that at the former date, the foreign trade of Britain and her
colonies exceeded that of France, Germany and Italy all combined. This
had ceased to be true by 1880, though even in 1890 British trade was still
larger than that of France and Germany together. In 1900 the combined
trade of Germany and France was little, if anything, short of Britain’s,
and in some categories of business it was greater.
In the United States the frontier was closing: but the attention of
A m erican manufacturing industry was still focused primarily on the vast
home market, where supplies of raw material and labour, if not of capital,
existed in unparalleled abundance. As an exporter the United States
remained, down to the turn of the century, principally concerned with the
sale of primary commodities and food — cotton, grain, tobacco — to in-
dustrial Europe. Her competition was not yet such as to cause serious
anxiety to British manufacturers in foreign markets, though the more
perceptive British industrialists who travelled in the United States in the
1890’s noted with concern the skill and drive that was fast making many
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American industries models of modernity, economy and efficiency. The
apparently insatiable demand of a vast protected domestic market enabled
the masters of the American iron and steel industry to plan their produc-
tion on a scale not possible in Britain. Output was going up, prices were
falling. Steel rails that cost 160 dollars a ton in 1875 cost little more than a
tenth of that figure in 1898. The tinplate manufacturers of South Wales
saw their orders from the American petroleum and food-canning indus-
tries diverted to a vigorous new industry that grew up — with the aid of
Welsh technicians — behind the McKinley Tariff of 1 890. The factors behind
such growth — the enterprise of manufacturers, the optimism of a labour
force that spurned ca’ canny, the constant application of capital to labour-
and cost-saving devices, the exploration and creation of markets through
advertising — all these were observed with interest mingled with concern as
the century came to a close. But the concern was not yet acute. America
had still much to do at home before she turned her attention to the outside
world. So long as American ingenuity was concentrated on machines for
making boots and shoes, cheap textiles and Mrlngersoll’s famous watches,
comment could afford to remain benevolent.
France like the United States was not in the front rank of the competitors
for the new expanding markets for manufacturers: but in her case it was
because she was industrialising herself at a slower tempo and with marked
difficulty. Down to about 1890 the slow growth of powered machinery in
industry and the slow increase in output suggest a country accepting only
reluctantly the conversion from a rural and individualistic way of life. It
was certainly not that the flame of French creative genius was burning less
brightly. In the sciences, as in the arts, the evidence of vitality was
abundant. The eighteenth-century tradition of inventiveness seemed strong
as ever. Were not the underwater periscope, the diesel engine, the photo-
lithographic process, the gyroscope and many other inventions all of
French origin? Was not la houille blanche that tumbled down the sides of
the Alps first harnessed by a Grenoble paper-maker, Berges, who thus
became the pioneer of hydro-electricity? Levassor, a Frenchman, pro-
duced the first pattern of the modern motor-car. In the 1 88o’s and 1 890’s
the discoveries of Pasteur and the Curies made France without question
the pioneer of the new medicine. France was, indeed, le pays des grandes
decouvertes. Yet the rate at which invention passed into industrial applica-
tion was much slower than amongst other peoples. The progress towards
industrialisation was, down to the mid- 1890's, leisurely. Thereafter, it
picked up : but the pace remained much slower than in Germany, and at the
end of the century French production of steel, at less than 2 million tons a
year, was only a third of that of Britain and a quarter that of Germany.
Textile output — especially of cotton, worsteds and silks — increased fast
with the application of power: and in the i89o’s steam power more than
doubled in France — from less than a million horse-power to some two
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million. But, compared with the contemporary gallop of German
industry, this was a jog-trot.
While French competition was of a unique and limited kind, and while
America was still preoccupied at home, the great rivalry in world markets
for manufacturing pre-eminence became that between Britain and
Germany. The transformation of Germany from an Agrarstaat to the
most advanced industrial economy in Europe remains one of the wonders
of economic history, a science not accustomed to sudden metamorphosis.
As late as 1871 the new German empire was only slightly less rural in
character, a trifle more industrialised, than the Prussia of 1816. Then, in
the last three decades of the nineteenth century, all the forces stimulating
industrial growth made their combined force felt. In those years, while
the population increased from 41 to 56 million, the percentage of Germans
who lived in towns rose from 36 to 54 per cent in the same period. The
figures suggest ‘a whole nation rushing to town’ 1 and the greatest rush
was to the nearest towns. It was not now the attractions of Pennsylvania
or the Mid- West but of Berlin, Essen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, and Leipzig
that drew workers and miners from the east, leaving East Prussia,
Pomerania and Silesia short of the labour they needed on the farms. This
radical adjustment of a whole society imposed social burdens: wages
were often low by British or American standards, food and working condi-
tions poor; German workers were the largest consumers in the world of
cheap butter substitutes; and relations between capital and labour gave
rise to intractable problems. But unquestionably (as Treitschke said)
the railways had released the latent energies of the German people.
The startling effects of this release of energy were reflected in coal out-
put figures. Between 1871 and 1900 German output (including lignite)
rose from 38 million tons to 150 million tons: British from 118 to 228
million tons: French from 13 to 33 million tons. Here, in combination
with the ore beds of Lorraine and Luxembourg, was the basis of an iron
and steel industry which, from small beginnings in 1870, overtook that of
Britain by 1900. Coal, moreover, supplied an export industry which
helped to create business for the rapidly growing mercantile marine of the
same period. Not that the Germans were newcomers to the ideas and
techniques of industry. On the contrary, rural industries — mainly rough
textiles — had been widespread in Germany since the Middle Ages. And
who can doubt that there was a continuity between the skills of the toy-
makers, clock-makers and weapon-makers of medieval Germany and the
new industries that made the engines and machines and drove up the out-
put of the woollen, worsted, silk and cotton industries? Some ancient
crafts, moreover, like that of the cutlers of Solingen in the Rhineland, were
preserved and strengthened by the prowess of Germany in electrical
1 J. H. Clapham, The Economic Development of France and Germany in the Nineteenth
Century, p. 279.
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technology which gave the small men light for working and power for
operating their lathes, wheels and grindstones.
Statistically, the contribution of Germany’s industries to her export
trade differed from that of British industries to hers : for while Britain’s
exports were traditionally based first on textiles, Germany put her affairs
in the reverse order. Iron and steel came top, then machinery, then coal,
followed by woollens, cottons and other textiles. It was not illogical;
for the German textile industries depended largely on foreign raw
materials. If Britons depended on foreigners for their food, Germans
depended on them for their clothes. But this should not hide the unique
character of some of the new processes she was developing through
technical education and by forms of industrial organisation peculiar to
Germany: the heavy chemical industry and the electrical industry. The
material basis of the chemical industry which grew from relatively nothing
in the 1860’s to the largest contemporary industry of its kind lay in the
rich salt and potash deposit of Prussian Saxony. Its scientific basis was
the system of state education. It was not unnatural that a country that
had produced men like Liebig, Bunsen, Hofmann and many other dis-
tinguished chemists should place a high value on scientific education.
Long before the dimensions of the German chemical industry were
apparent, Henry Roscoe (who had managed only by Herculean personal
example to prevent Owens College Manchester from abolishing the Chair
of Chemistry to which he had been appointed) told the Select Committee
on Scientific Instruction that in Germany ‘a love of science and knowledge
for its own sake is much more seen in those universities than it is in ours ’.
For little more than £20 a year, and more cheaply elsewhere, a student at
Berlin could provide himself with lectures and laboratory experience. The
link with industry was provided by the technische Hochschulen where
industrial scientists were taught science in an applied form at a higher
standard than at the English Mechanics’ Institutes. In 1870 Prussia was
spending £25,000 a year on them: by 1900, £1 17,000, and the investment
duly produced a steady flow of well trained N.C.O’s for the German
chemical industry, led by an upper cadre of inventive chemists and
engineers from the universities. While in France and Britain chemical
manufacturers were increasingly hampered by obsolescent plant — especi-
ally the Leblanc soda process which lay at the base of much of the
industry — Germany was free to develop new methods, like the Solvay
process. German sulphuric acid producers were free to attack the markets
for dyestuffs and agricultural fertilisers. In every branch of production
there were stupendous increases between 1870 and 1900 — output of
sulphuric acid and alkali was multiplied eight times, that of dyestuffs about
four times. The German fine chemicals and synthetic dyestuffs industry
was the shining example of an industry based on British and French
invention converted to a virtual monopoly for Germany by education and
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enterprise. By 1900 the small German firms which had pushed on with
the synthesis of chemical dyes were giant concerns that accounted for
some 90 per cent of world production of dyes.
The creation of the electrical industry was the greatest single economic
achievement of modern Germany. Again, some of the basic inventions
were of an earlier date than the period covered by this survey. Werner von
Siemens, a thrustful brother of the young German scientist who had
landed in England in 1843, designed and constructed six years later the
first major electric telegraph in Germany, which in 1849 conveyed to an
astonished Berlin the news of the election of the emperor within an hour of
the event. Here were the beginnings of the great business of Siemens and
Halske, for many years linked to the British business established by
William Siemens. 1867 saw Werner’s invention of the dynamo. Within a
few years of the invention of the telephone in 1861, Germany became the
largest user of it. After the dynamo came experiments with the trans-
mission of power and with electric traction and the success of these in turn
produced the electric lighting of the German cities and the provision of
electric trams. English travellers noted how far ahead Germany was of
Britain in such things. A great new industry sprang into existence to
supply the generating machinery, the telegraph material, cables and lamps
required for the new equipment. In the 1882 census, there was no category
for workers employed in the electrical industry: in 1895 it registered
25,000 workers; by 1906-7, 107,000.
Like the chemical industry, the electrical industry illustrated by its con-
centration (it was dominated by three large firms) the peculiar character-
istics which large-scale production and expensive plant were beginning to
demand. Much of its market was abroad, in countries like Italy, Switzer-
land and Scandinavia, now delivered from their natural fuel shortage by
hydro-electricity. The plant was often made in Germany which thus
manufactured the means of industrial revolution for the third phase of
industrialisation in Europe, just as Britain had manufactured the means
for the second.
The structure of the German export trade, its emphasis on heavy capital
goods, the speed of its advance between 1875 and 1895, the advanced
stage of transport and public utility development in the West, all these
combined with Germany’s geographical situation and her traditional
political habits to give German industry a special interest in foreign
markets, especially in the Middle East and Far East. But the new German
imperialism cannot be laid exclusively — not even primarily — at the door
of German industry. The new mercantilism, like the old, was the product
of many forces, motives, ambitions, not by any means all economic. Its
aspirations were expressed by the so-called ‘Historical Economists’, led
by Gustav Schmoller, Professor at Berlin after 1882. For Schmoller and
his school, which had no counterpart in any other country, there were no
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economic laws valid for all time. Economic theory had a value only in
relation to practice, history, and real institutions : and in Germany these
demanded that the state intervene and regulate economic affairs in the
interests of national power and national wealth, the dual objectives of
policy which were always associated. The Navy Law of 1900 had its
intellectual roots in doctrines that had been maturing for a quarter of a
century. Economic progress was equated with the efficiency of the
nation’s political institutions: ‘it was precisely’, Schmoller wrote in 1884,
‘those governments which understood how to put the might of their fleets
and admiralties, the apparatus of customs laws and navigation laws, with
rapidity, boldness and clear purpose at the service of the economic
interests of the nation and state, which obtained thereby the lead in the
struggle and riches and industrial prosperity’.
The fluctuations of the previous decade had already weakened the faith
of the great agrarian interests of the east — normally com exporters — in
free trade. After 1877 Bismarck was listening ever more attentively to
the complaints of the manufacturing interest of the west, all the more
because his Treasury had also felt the pinch of depression. From 1879
Germany had a planned economy, within which industry, with the ap-
proval and co-operation of the state, attempted to achieve stability behind
the tariff. German industry was free to plan price agreements, organise its
raw material supplies, divide and organise its markets. No traditions of
individualism, no suspicions of political autocracy, hindered German
industry from forming great combines for self-protection against depres-
sion as opinion did in Britain and especially in the United States in the
hard times of the 1870’s, 1880’s, and 1890’s. The amount of fixed capital
sunk in the new industries meant that markets could not be left to chance:
demand as well as supply had to be ‘ organised ’. This theory reached its
logical climax in the relations between the engineering and electrical
industries and their ‘customers’. The ‘customers’ were themselves com-
panies— consuming companies — formed, with the help of the supplying
company, to buy its products. The process only carried one step farther
the principle of the vertical combine by which each component firm sold
its product to a ‘customer’ one stage nearer to the ultimate market. And
it was merely the extreme example of the ‘ associations ’, mainly promoted
through the financing banks, which proliferated in late nineteenth-century
Germany, outraging all the principles of free competition still dear to
British economists if not to all British businessmen. The German in-
dustrialist did not differ markedly in outlook from the government
servant who administered public affairs. Economics was itself a branch
of law and the same training as Verwaltungsjurist served for a career in
business or the professions. The eighteenth-century Kameralist, the ser-
vant of the royal treasury, had often in Germany performed functions
carried out elsewhere by the private entrepreneur: the tradition was not
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entirely dead in Bismarck’s Germany. Resources were still comparatively
meagre and neither statesmen nor economists were prepared to leave
their exploitation to the workings of laissez-faire. The alliance of Junkers,
industrialists, bureaucrats and economists assured their neo-mercantilism
undisputed sway: while cartels and trusts had to fight a tough battle
against public opinion in America and Britain, no influential section of
opinion challenged Germany’s need for them. After the crisis of 1900, the
Darmstadter Bank observed that ‘ the community of interests of the great
industrial groups, as expressed in cartels, protects industry from expenses
and sudden collapses such as happened before their establishment’.
They did more than that. To men like Mevissen, the founder of the
Darmstadter Bank, Werner von Siemens, Harkort the engineer and scores
of others, the industrial struggle for world markets seemed a mission for
German prestige. They felt entitled to the support of the German state —
protective tariffs, subsidies, preferential freight rates and the like. The
result was that Germany missed the age of free trade, passing ‘virtually
without a break from the age of Colbert to the age of Dr Schacht U
The effects of the new mercantilism in Germany have been much
debated. Critics held that Germany was constructing in these years a
dangerously top-heavy economy, overloaded with artificial and pampered
industries, for which Germany had no need and no aptitude, apart from
the dictates of autarky and military/ ambition. Certainly the cost was
high, even when fair allowance has been made for the need of infant
industries for protection, and the need for time to acquire new skills.
Then again, the people of Germany, partly because of the policies of pro-
tection, subsidies and ‘the community of interests’ that promoted un-
economic investments and kept them afloat, were kept down to living
standards lower than their skill and labour deserved. Between 1876 and
1900 the average real per capita income of the population in Germany
rose from £24 to £32 per annum, while that in Britain rose from £28 to
£51, increases of 33 and 82 per cent respectively. The slow progress of
trade unionism no doubt had something to do with it. Union numbers
never reached the million mark in the nineteenth century, and widespread
socialism amongst the workers and intense conservatism amongst em-
ployers both made it difficult to reach wage agreement by means of
collective bargaining. The other criticism of the German economy — that
its tendency to overproduce was bound to lead, sooner or later, to the
search for outlets by political or military means — is more difficult to assess.
There were certainly close relationships between some German industri-
alists and the political demagogues who began to dominate German
politics in the last few years of the century. What their influence was in the
course of policy is still a matter of opinion.
Meanwhile, British observers had been noting with growing concern
1 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1954), p. 126.
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since the i870’s the rising competition of foreign, and especially of
German, industry. From the 1870’s warnings began to trickle in from
British consuls in various foreign lands. The French were beginning to
compete for the Italian textiles market. Belgian iron was making its
presence felt in Spain. Roumanian peasants were showing a preference for
German ploughs. The cloud was still only the size of a man’s hand. By
the mid-i88o’s it was decidedly larger. A consul in Greece, lamenting
gains — indisputably mostly German by now — at the expense of British
exporters, thought that British manufacturers were not moving with the
times or consulting at all the tastes and wishes of foreign consumers. The
German, contrariwise, had ‘ no prejudices ’ : if he found that an article of a
certain shape would command a ready sale in any particular country, he
would make it ... ‘ however foreign it may be to his own taste or wants ’.
This kind of charge continued to be levelled for many years. Rightly or
wrongly, the Commission on the Depression in Trade and Industry in
1885 were impressed by the evidence : ‘ The increasing severity of [German]
competition — in every quarter of the world ’, they wrote, ‘ the perseverance
and enterprise of the Germans, are making themselves felt. In the actual
production of commodities we have few, if any, advantages over them;
and in a knowledge of the markets of the world, a desire to accommodate
themselves to local tastes or idiosyncrasies, a determination to obtain a
footing wherever they can, and a tenacity in maintaining it, they appear to
be gaining ground on us.’
The British response to these unfavourable comparisons varied ac-
cording to time and place. The most intelligent businessmen — like Ludwig
Mond and his partners in Cheshire, William Lever, next door, or Cros-
fields of Warrington — recognised the value of German scientific know-
ledge, and bought or borrowed both it and its practitioners freely.
Progressive sections of the chemical industry took full advantage of
German experts in these years. Other industries were more complacent.
The iron and steel industry was relatively slow to follow up the economies
of heat and power made possible in German plant practice by linking the
various processes together as continuously as possible. They faced, un-
doubtedly, some problems not always allowed fair weight. There were, in
reality, few areas of British manufacture where genuine ‘mass-production’
could be said to predominate. Most industries made their products in
relatively small batches, often to special orders; processes and factories
were still rich in the embarrassment of craftsmen and traditional skills.
The nature of ‘quality’ markets built up slowly — in the case of woollens
over the centuries — and the natural individualism of the private business
tended to discourage innovations which might reduce costs by damaging
quality. Less defensible conservatism was rooted in simple ignorance or
insouciance, like that of the Welsh tinplate manufacturer whose response
to a new method was to inquire ‘whether any other fool had tried it yet’.
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When the skies cleared later in the 1 88o’s, the natural optimism of the
businessman quickly reasserted itself. The severe slump of 1891-5 brought
forth once more protests from Members of Parliament who raged against
the purchase of Bavarian pencils by the foreign office, or the importation
of cheap brushes made by German convict labour. But the rising trade
and employment of the last years of the century seemed to quiet English
fears once more. German competition was by now something to be lived
with. Protection had little popular support and even those industries most
hit by German rivalry were slow to abandon a creed which had taken
them so long to learn.
Only Great Britain and the small western European countries remained
free-traders. Bismarck’s tariff of 1879 was followed, from 1881, by the
raising of French tariffs. In 1892 the whole French tariff was raised.
Russia raised her tariffs in 1881 and 1882. The McKinley tariff of 1890 and
the Dingley tariff of 1897 raised American tariffs until they ranked among
the highest. The British colonies adopted tariffs: Canada and Victoria
adopted high ones in 1879; in 1900 all Australia went protectionist.
The real victim of continuing free trade in Britain in these circumstances
was the British farmer, who was ruined twice over: first in the 1870’s and
again in the mid- 1890’s. In industry, within the framework of Great
Britain’s declining share in the expanding total of trade, the main con-
sequence was a shift in the relative importance of the various manufactures
in the export markets.
The largest group of manufactures, accounting for nearly half of the
value of British exports in the early 1880’s, was textiles and yarn, especi-
ally Lancashire cotton. The largest markets were in India and China but
by no means unimportant customers, especially for quality goods, were to
be found in the United States, Germany, and central Europe. And here
was the rub. As tariffs rose in Europe and America, as the economies of
backward nations developed — with the aid most often of British capital
and British capital goods — the market for British cotton piece goods in
those countries ceased to exist. By 1900 British cotton textile exporters
were forced back on to the Asiatic markets, and even here the building of
cotton mills had begun. Even woollens did little more than hold their own
in the last decade of the century. The industrial growth that was going on
behind the rising tariff walls called, on the other hand, for coal, iron, steel
and machinery to equip and energise the new factories. Hence the
stimulus to British industries that provided them. The situation in the last
decades of the century emerges clearly from the export figures in the table
opposite.
It was difficult to deny that one section of British industry was providing
foreign competitors with weapons tobeused against other sections of British
industry. Much of the automatic machinery by which the United States
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ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
The value of the principal British exports (in thousands of £)
To ten principal
To all countries
A
protected countries
( 't
1880 1900
( — A ~ \
1880 1900
Cotton goods
75,564
69,751
15,990
13,840
Woollens and worsteds
21,488
21,806
13,526
11,475
Iron and steel, etc.
32,000
37,638
17,626
I5U7I
Machinery, etc.
9,264
19,620
5,797
10,892
Coal, coke
8,373
38,620
4,822
23,349
outpaced British competitors was of British invention and some of it of
British manufacture. There were not lacking critics of the apparent folly of
equipping customers so that they might stop buying from Great Britain.
Coal export — as a raw material for potential competitors — was open to a
similar objection, though here it might be argued that coal was the neces-
sary outward bulk cargo to economise the operation of Britain’s great
mercantile fleet that brought in the grain, timber and forage for her
industrial millions. The real answer to such critics was that Britain could
not possibly hope to hold out against the rising tide of economic national-
ism and maintain a monopolistic and dangerously specialised economy.
The only remedy was to put the eggs in a larger number of baskets. The
process of industrial variegation, even when reflected in the rise of indus-
tries which seemed to be sowing dragon’s teeth, was therefore part of an
ultimate remedy, even though the immediate readjustment was painful.
While manufacturing industry remained the heart of the British eco-
nomy, methods for marketing and disposing of goods were becoming a
more important source of income and the growing yield of earlier lending
played an increasing part in the nation’s accounts. Ever since the Napo-
leonic wars the deficit on Britain’s visible trade had been growing
until, for the years 1871-5, the average yearly deficit was about £65
millions. But Britain’s earnings through the commercial services she pro-
vided for foreigners — insurance, handling of goods, brokerage, commis-
sion trading, and above all shipping — had risen so swiftly that there was
still an annual overall surplus of some £23 millions a year, quite apart
from an income of some £50 millions a year from Britain’s accumulated
foreign investments. A striking feature was the earnings from shipping,
which had risen since the mid-century from some £18 millions a year to
nearly £50 millions. By the first quinquennium of the twentieth century
they reached nearly £70 millions a year. Britain continued to hold the lead
at sea long after she had lost it on land. Even in the late 1 890’s the tonnage
built by British shipyards for the British flag was only a trifle below the
record figures of the early 1890’s: that built for foreign flags was bigger
than ever before.
The second half of the 1870’s saw a fundamental change in the national
accounts. The value of imports into Britain rose steeply, so that the deficit
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on visible trade increased (by about ioo per cent) to some £125 millions a
year. Britain’s manufactured exports paid — ton for ton — for less than
they had done before the slump of 1873. The terms of trade, that is,
moved temporarily against the manufacturing country, and Britain’s total
surplus on visible trade and on services turned in these years to a sizeable
annual deficit of £32 millions. For the first time since the battle of
Waterloo, the books could be balanced only by the yields from overseas
investments — now well over £1000 millions and yielding an annual
income to British investors of about £55 millions. From 1881 there was
some improvement; the deficit on visible trade dropped as the terms of
trade improved. But from 1891 to 1906 there was no year when Britain
did not have to rely on her large income from foreign investment to help
her to pay her way. And this she was easily able to do, for the income
that accrued to her in this way had itself more than doubled — from
£50 millions to £112 millions per annum — between 1870 and 1900.
Clearly, the balance of Britain’s economic interests, and her situation
vis-a-vis the nations her capital had helped to develop, was changing. But
the change can be overdramatised. It is not by any means certain that the
period of ‘ export surplus ’ was over in 1 875 as writers have often suggested.
There were, on the contrary, many years between 1880 and 1914 when
Britain could still show a surplus on the trade and services she carried on
with the rest of the world.
Critics have never been lacking of what has sometimes been called the
‘policy’ of foreign investment, though whether such a multiplicity of
private decisions can correctly be described by a term implying a conscious
direction of things is very doubtful. The main objections that have been
urged against it are, first, that it was unprofitable; second, that it implied
— necessitated even — a new and undesirable interference in the affairs of
the countries to which money was lent, in other words, that economic
penetration went hand in glove with imperialism; third, that the ‘capital’
exported would have been better employed at home, and that the migra-
tion of capital fostered the growth of a rentier class whose main interests
lay outside Britain. The most recent investigations suggest that British
investors generally placed their money with prudence and profit, especially
after 1875. It seems doubtful whether late-Victorian governments sup-
ported imperialist policies where earlier governments would not have done
so. Mid-Victorian Britain had developed India as an economic colony,
Latin America as a sphere of private trade and investment, and there was
no sharp change in the late-Victorian period. Investment continued to
flow to non-Empire as well as Empire countries. The spectacular late-
Victorian entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes, Barnato and Beit in Africa, or
Cassel in Egypt, were no more ‘typical’ of overseas enterprise than
William Lever or Thomas Lipton were of home industrial enterprise.
They were, however, ‘characteristic’ in that they were opening up new
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geographical territories, just as the new industrialists were creating new
areas of domestic consumption. But it would be wrong to infer that the
older areas became in either case less important when in fact they were
only, like the underside of the iceberg, less observed. The scramble for
Africa after 1888 should not entirely divert the historian’s eye from the
effects of the earlier fertilisation of India, Latin America and Canada
which was now bearing fruit.
Much criticism of the ‘export’ of capital failed to perceive how deeply
and intricately it was entangled with the process of production itself. The
export industries would have been unable to find and maintain, much less
expand, their markets without the willingness of investors to lend foreign
customers the capital with which they purchased these goods. Thus South
Wales ironmasters had taken United States railway bonds in part pay-
ment for rails; steel-makers of Sheffield, Glasgow and Swansea had
invested in the development of iron-ore workings in Spain, which pro-
duced half Britain’s ore requirements in this period. The connection
between the exporting industries and the migration of capital was not
always as direct or immediate as this : but the effects were none the less
plain. The railway building, the steamships and the reapers brought in the
rich harvest of grain — from North America in the late 1870’s, from South
America after 1885 — which was a prime factor in raising the real wages of
the British working man in late-Victorian England. That it had promoted
exports, and therefore employment; that it had speeded the flow of food
and raw-material imports, and therefore raised standards of welfare,
health and comfort ; these were themselves the partial answer to the charge
that Britain would have done better to keep her capital at home. There
had, in reality, been no alternative, for neither the private nor public
enterprise that might have created an alternative demand for the iron,
steel, rolling-stock, telegraphs, machinery and the like, existed in nine-
teenth-century Britain.
In Britain the general advantages of foreign investment seemed to be
dwindling as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. It seemed
less likely that further investment would reduce the cost of imports, and
therefore the cost of living; rather more likely that it might increase
foreign competition. The form of capital export which consisted in putting
down factories behind the tariff walls of former importing countries was
probably the form of capital export least open to criticism: there was,
after all, no way to avoid the gradual death by strangulation of such
former export trades. As one capitalist put it: ‘When the duty exceeds the
cost of separate managers and separate plant, then it will be an economy
to erect works in the [purchasing] country so that our customers can be
more cheaply supplied from them.’ 1 Such ventures were common after
1900.
1 C. Wilson, History of Unilever (1954), vol. 1, p. 99.
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Nor was investment concentrated abroad. It was as a direct result of
enterprise at home as well as of investment abroad that there was, from
the early i88o’s, a many-sided improvement in the British standard of
living that was well in advance of anything achieved elsewhere except by
the bounding economy of North America. Real wages improved by some
75 per cent between i860 and 1900, and about one-quarter of this increase
took place in the last decade of the century. The rise was due basically to
the increased wealth that came from the enterprise and investment of
earlier years, its wide scope and downward penetration through society
partly to the fall in the cost of living that came from the returning wave of
cheaper food and raw-material imports. These in turn were the rewards
for earlier overseas investment, especially in railways. It owed something
too to the steady pressure of trade unions on employers, to the ‘prosperity
strikes’ of the 1890’s and to collective bargaining in all its forms. Lower
prices for necessities left more to spare for semi-necessities and even for
luxuries. There existed, in short, amongst the io-million-odd working men
and their wives a mass market which caught the imagination of some of
the liveliest business minds of the day. They saw, as one observant
journalist put it, that ‘the factory housewife is saving, cleanly, loquacious
and very often extremely shrewd’. It was largely from the pence earned
and saved by them that some very large industries were reared in the
1880’s and 1890’s. National consumption and production of soap was
probably running at about 100,000 tons a year in i860 or double what it
had been in 1800. By 1890 it was 260,000 tons, and by 1900 320,000 tons.
There were many other industries helping to create higher standards of
life and comfort — even entertainment — for the rising artisanate: indus-
tries providing processed foods were prominent; chocolate, jams, tea,
margarine, beef extract, tinned meat and fish, sausages and so on. Nothing
is more typical of these years than the multiple grocery shop that cut its
prices by specialising in one or two commodities — butter, margarine, eggs.
Thomas Lipton, the first of a long fine of entrepreneurs of this kind,
started his shops in Glasgow in the 1 88o’s, and came south to London and
the home counties in the 1890’s. While Lipton took care of their diet, men
like Alfred Harmsworth and Arthur Pearson hastened to seize the op-
portunities created by free education of the masses. They provided the
halfpenny papers that relayed news of politics and — equally important —
the turf. These new enterprises were competing strongly for the working-
class pocket against that older enterprise that had so far provided a large
part of working-class diet and not a little of its entertainment: brewing.
Farther up the social scale came another institution typical of the times
— the great London general stores that catered for a middle-class market.
As an historian of Victorian England has remarked : ‘ The lead of the great
industries was shortening: and, in compensation, capital, labour and
intelligence were flowing away to light industry, distribution, salesman-
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ship.’ 1 It was here, amongst the new industries, that the natural disciples
of Samuel Smiles, the opportunists, the advertisers, were to be found in
the largest numbers. Their contribution to industry was different from
that of their predecessors whose genius contained a larger element of
technical knowledge. Their emphasis was on selling goods and they
enormously extended the methods for doing this, widening, incidentally,
the gap between themselves and the older industrialists who still looked
askance on their devices. ‘The whole object of advertising’, said one of
the new men, ‘is to build a halo round the article.’ Often of dissenting
liberal stock themselves, they frequently represented a kind of social
enlightenment that was at once genuine and self-interested, for they knew
that the fortunes of their businesses were intimately connected with those
of the millions of customers, mainly working class, to whom they sold.
The profit-sharing scheme and the model industrial village, Boumville in
1879, Port Sunlight in 1888, were their characteristic contributions to the
improvement of industrial relations. What proportion such industries
formed of total production it is difficult to say : certainly it was increasing,
but they were still ‘characteristic’ of a changing society rather than
‘typical’. The ‘basic’ industries remained the heart of the economy. The
new industries were nevertheless to contribute much to the change in
industrial methods and relationships. They had, moreover, one feature
that was to be increasingly important: their plant could be established
with relative ease wherever there might appear to be a potential market.
They could therefore, and did, circumvent tariff's by creating a local
production and supply.
Contemporary opinion divided sharply over the health and prospects
of this maturing economy. Sir Robert Giffen, the statistician, who
exercised a powerful influence on public opinion, was convinced that the
British economy was growing rapidly and with special benefit to the
working classes. Patience, he thought, would cure most of the evils that
arose from its temporary fluctuations, and his faith in laissez-faire was in
no wise dimmed by the vicissitudes of the ‘ Great Depression’. Growth in
some large industries, he agreed, might be slowing down, but it was going
on in less observed places. ‘Industry’, he wrote in 1887, ‘by a natural law
is becoming more and more miscellaneous, and as the population
develops, the disproportionate growth of the numbers employed in such
miscellaneous industries and in what may be called incorporeal functions,
such as teachers, artists and the like, prevents the increase of staple pro-
ducts continuing at the former rate.’ Others, including Alfred Marshall,
were less sure that all was well. There was something to be said for both
sides. But at least in some directions, as the historian of the Victorian
economy has said, British conservatism had been shaken by the new com-
petition and Britain ‘was preparing to prove that she was not decadent,
1 G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age (1949).
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though both enemies and friends often said that she was’. 1 The most
recent statistical inquiry has likewise concluded that the last thirty years
of the nineteenth century saw a period of most rapid sustained growth in
the British economy. 2
The task for the historical imagination in this, more even than in most
recent phases of modern history, is to comprehend a process of economic
growth that consisted not in a steady expansion but in a series of fluctua-
tions. In this process, some industries were set back, as British farming
was ; some were actually killed, as many peasant crafts in Europe were.
Yet the phase as a whole was one of increasing output, and the aggregate
volume of wealth emerged from each cyclical phase not smaller but larger
than before. Economic fluctuations were not in themselves new; what was
new was their amplitude and pervasiveness. The inquiry into their causes
has proved, more than most economic inquiries, a bottomless well. The
causation of cycles and the interrelation of the various economic pheno-
mena that composed them remains in many respects a matter of hypo-
thesis. That the incidence of major fluctuations was the result of massive
friction between inventions, large-scale manufacture, investment, the
supply of money and goods, changes in demand, wars, is merely a truism ;
but it is worth saying if only to demonstrate that it is, prima facie, un-
likely that an economy in a condition of rapid and continual change
would behave according to a regular rhythm. Markets for heavy capital
goods behaved differently from markets for consumer goods. In the
depression of the early 1890’s, for example, British textile production
dropped relatively little, while iron and steel production fell heavily by
one-third. In 1885-6 — dark years for many industries — the members of
the British Soap Makers Association were so prosperous that it was not
easy to persuade them of the need to attend meetings. Conversely, they
failed to share in the revival of the late 1 88o’s. Their fortunes were linked
almost entirely to raw-material prices. The incidence of misfortune varied
also between nation and nation: the crisis of the mid-1880's was more
severe on England than on Germany: that of 1900 reversed the order of
things.
The cyclical progress of these years may be summarised somewhat in
this wise: from 1870 to 1873 Europe was at the tail end of a long upward
trend of rising prices and profits. Capital was still flowing into railway
construction, industry was still expanding to meet these and other needs.
Employers, bankers, and farmers shared in the prosperity and Punch
could publish cartoons of British miners drinking champagne. Then from
June 1873 European markets collapsed and there followed nearly a
1 J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (C.U.P. 1938), vol. in, p. 223.
2 P. Deane, ‘Contemporary Estimates of National Income in the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, IX, no. 3 (1957).
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quarter of a century when investment yields were low, price levels low.
Per contra, the real wages of labour and the standard of living they made
possible rose during this phase often known as the Great Depression.
Unemployment rose in Britain during specially bad years, particularly in
trades connected with the export of capital goods, but well over 90 per
cent of the working force was employed at wages that rose by some
2 per cent a year from 1874 to 1900. The so-called Great Depression was a
depression of certain business prices and profits, especially severe in the
heavy industries that had expanded rapidly during the previous period of
buoyancy. Rail prices fell by 60 per cent from 1872 to 1881. This tempor-
ary over-expansion in the heavy industries coincided with the growing
flood of grain and materials made possible by earlier investment to bring
a general collapse of prices. For the moment there was an embarrassment
of riches.
New American expansion brought some revival from 1879 to 1882.
Gold in South Africa, the Panama Canal plans, and expansion in America
and in the British Empire gave new hopes from 1887-90; but this boom
also broke in a welter of bankruptcies, repudiations and disappointments.
The centre of the storm was the fall of the House of Baring, deeply
involved in South American affairs. It was not till 1896 that a new up-
ward trend can again be distinguished. New demand for rails — in Europe,
America and the Empire — was its foundation: but now there was new
equipment to be supplied for the electrical, chemical, petroleum, motor-
car and other new industries, and the new impetus was to last until 1914.
The causes of economic fluctuations might be remote and mysterious ;
not so their effects. The unfettered competition of the generally prosperous
third quarter of the century was altogether too bracing an air for business-
men in the 1880’s, and in every country they sought shelter from the chill
winds not only behind national tariffs, but also behind agreements to
restrict what they often called ‘cut-throat competition’. These agreements
may be divided into two broad categories: those which aimed at main-
taining the sovereign independence of the firms which entered into the
voluntary contract to restrict competition; and those which aimed at
creating a larger business unit by submerging the identity of the existing
businesses in that of a larger business. The former method went by many
names — Kartell (cartel), syndicate, pool, conference, comptoir — but it
usually portended similar policies. Members of the cartel would agree not
to sell their product below a certain price and they might well come to
some arrangement for dividing the market, either by geographical area or
by a quota system. This might culminate in a central marketing agency.
In Britain especially, such arrangements sometimes grew out of much
older trade associations whose expressions of general benevolence had
usually been as vague as they were pious. Now something more precise
and positive was needed. The soap trade, for example, had had such an
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association for many years but it was not until the i89o’s that it began
overtly to fix prices, and even at this date such a departure from British
laissez-faire traditions was enough to provoke the secretary to resign. The
persistence of a large number of small businesses meant that the equi-
librium of agreements to limit competition was always precarious. As
soon as times improved they were tom up. Their threat to the interests of
consumers was therefore very limited. Nor did a legal tradition strongly
biased against restraint of trade help architects building on what was
politely called 4 the principle of association ’.
British industry in search of stability went therefore rather for the more
permanent type of association. Between the crisis of the mid-i88o’s and
the end of the century, a number of very large amalgamations had been
formed : the Salt Union, comprising all the Cheshire producers and some
others (1888) and the United Alkali Company, comprising all the Le Blanc
soda-makers (1891), were the most important. From the mid- 1890’s came
large textile mergers. In 1895 J. and P. Coats, the sewing-thread manu-
facturers, joined with their four largest rivals. Brunner Mond, the great
chemical firm operating the Solvay process, were absorbing competitors
after 1895. Then came the Calico Printers, the Yorkshire Wool Combers,
the British Cotton and Wool Dyers, and many others. The precise methods
by which such unions were achieved — outright purchase by one firm of
other firms, exchange of shares or the formation of a new holding com-
pany — are less important than the permanent increase in the size of the
business unit. Some aimed at greater efficiency, others at quick profits, a
few at outright monopoly. In general, success came to those which
organised themselves so as to pursue consistent business policies.
Germany was in general more fertile soil than Britain for the new
growth. After a Bavarian court in 1873 gave a verdict in favour of the
legality of a Kartell, their numbers multiplied. In conjunction with the
tariff of 1879, they gave German industry substantial protection against
that foreign competition which had threatened it so severely in 1873.
Three great Kartells handled a range of products vital to Germany in this
stage of development: the potash syndicate formed in 1879 to combat
over-production, the Westphalian coal Kartells from 1879 onwards, and
the iron and steel Kartells from the 1870’s. Most of the Kartells in
Germany dated from the 1880’s. They were the offspring of adversity and,
like the British trade associations, none too stable in face of prosperity:
but in some industries — chemicals for example — they proved to be a
forum from which more permanent groupings ( Interessengemeinschaften )
were to emerge. These formed the more easily in Germany because so
many firms had common links in the shape of directors appointed by the
banks. German industry was knit together by a labyrinthine series of
channels that offended against all the dogmas of classical economics but
which Germans had come to regard as perfectly normal.
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Both German and British promoters of business union alike looked for
their model to America ; and especially to that Standard Oil Alliance into
which, between 1872 and 1881, John D. Rockefeller had brought a very
large segment of the American oil industry. Rockefeller in oil, Carnegie
and Morgan in steel, Harriman and Hill in railways, created great trusts
which achieved their purpose of restricting competition so effectively as to
arouse a storm of protest. ‘A small number of men’, wrote that vigorous
opponent of trusts Henry Demarest Lloyd, in 1894, ‘are obtaining the
power to forbid any but themselves to supply the people with fire in nearly
every form known to modem life and industry, from matches to loco-
motives and electricity.’ Liberal fears were partly economic but they were
even more political — the fear that America was creating organisations so
rich as to be able to corrupt all politics and destroy forever the founda-
tions of a free society. The Sherman anti-Trust Act of 1890 attempted to
halt the movement, but little had been done when Roosevelt came to
power in 1900. Even Roosevelt’s caution was caricatured by Mr Dooley:
‘The thrusts’, says he, ‘are heejous monsthers — on wan hand I would
stamp them undher fut ; on th’other hand, not so fast.’
Fluctuations in sales and profits brought about amalgamations that
were principally of the ‘horizontal’ type, that is, between firms which sold
the same or similar products. Simultaneously technology suggested
amalgamations of a ‘vertical’ kind. By the 1870’s Bolckow Vaughan of
Middlesbrough owned a dozen collieries, ore mines in Spain and Africa,
and a fleet of steamers, employed 10,000 men and were moving from iron
into steel manufacturing. This move to secure raw-material supplies was
everywhere characteristic of industries which demanded a smooth ‘flow’
of production. Chemical manufacturers secured their supplies of alkali
by buying salt deposits, pottery manufacturers went into china-clay
mining, soap-makers operated vegetable-oil mills.
Both types of expansion needed larger capital resources than those
available from partnerships or family relationships. In 1875 The Times
city column was still entitled ‘Stocks, Railway and Other Shares’. The
‘others’ comprised a few telegraph companies and half a dozen industrial
concerns. By 1900 they had been joined by South African mines, fourteen
large breweries, seven iron and steel firms, chemicals, textiles, and the
great London stores and multiple grocery chains. Thus the trade cycle and
technology combined to generate size in industry; size demanded capital,
capital demanded security, and security demanded combination. Manu-
facturers were often still genuine believers in a free economy and indi-
vidualism: but the economies of size could not be ignored. This was to be
the recurrent paradox : that competition was always killing competition.
From an early stage, German industry had demonstrated authoritarian
and ‘collective’ tendencies quite unlike the atomistic improvisatory
method of Britain, where the fathers of the industrial revolution had been
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tinkerers like Arkwright and Cartwright. Industrial organisation was
profoundly affected by the problems of obtaining capital in a country
where wealth was thinly spread. Entrepreneurs in heavy industry had
necessarily from the start looked to the banks, and the banks had played
an increasing role in the formation of companies after 1870. The joint-
stock bank was not merely a credit organisation but a politico-economic
agency for converting Germany into an industrial state. Speculative
advances of capital were made to the iron and steel industries in the
i88o’s. Between 1894 and 1900 the Essen Kr edit anst alt trebled its capital
in order to advance capital to the surrounding mining and metal industries.
Many of the banks created in the 1870’s and i88o’s — the Deutsche,
Dresdener, and the Reichsbank — performed such functions. This form of
financial organisation did not encourage the maximum of competition
that economists in Britain and British businessmen (in theory at least)
regarded as the healthy norm of an industrial system. The banks appointed
directors of industry who could influence its policy, and sometimes even
the price of its shares through sales from the banks’ portfolios. They them-
selves were simultaneously undergoing a steady process of amalgamation.
The system offered considerable scope for government intervention and
control. Nor did German economists in general object to its implications.
Capitalist association, from informal agreement on prices via the Kartell
to the fully integrated Konzern, was regarded not as an aberration but as
a phenomenon resulting from the normal flow of economic development
towards monopoly. Its justification lay in the greater stability it provided
against the fluctuations of profits and employment.
Not only goods but services were affected by the trend towards collec-
tive self-help. If the nature of an industrial society made trade unionism
more necessary, it also made it easier to organise. Men who worked in
pits and factories were more likely to feel a community of interest and
realise it than men scattered in cottages or small workshops. But there
were two conditions of trade-union development. The first was that public
opinion, political authority and the law should look favourably on the
claim of labour to organise and enforce its rights. Secondly, that the
labour force should be a stable body of wage-earners conscious of the
permanent status of wage labour. In most countries one or both of these
conditions was absent. In France, the restrictions on labour associations
were not withdrawn until 1884 and the Confederation Generate du Travail,
formed in 1895, did nothing to make its doctrines of direct action effective
until the next century. Belgium had allowed unions from 1 866, but con-
tinued to penalise strikers. In Germany, unionism made progress between
1868 and 1875, but after Bismarck declared war on the ‘Social Peril’ in
1878 more than a hundred unions were suppressed. The bait offered in
return was insurance against sickness, accident, incapacity and old age,
and politically it was not unsuccessful. The problem in the United States
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was different : a high degree of mobility, social and geographical, among
the workers. If a man did not move up, he could always move out. Such
conditions did not make for stable unions. The early, idealistic unions all
fell on evil days. Even the Federation of Labour had cyily about half a
million members in 1900. Against these hesitant beginnings the achieve-
ment of British labour was impressive. Disraeli’s Act of 1875 put an end
to the legal doubts of half a century and legalised collective bargaining and
its incidents. The i87o’s saw vigorous action — both the so-called ‘pros-
perity strikes’ of 1871 and the strikes against wage reductions of 1873
and 1875. Encouraged by the great dock strike of 1889, unionism forged
ahead in the 1890’s, penetrating and organising the labour employed in
whole industries instead of merely crafts. By 1900 membership passed the
two million mark. It made its strength felt by stoppages and strikes; in
1893 over 30 million days’ work was lost. Some large unions, like the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, found themselves faced by counter-
vailing organisations of employers like the Engineering Employers Federa-
tion, which fought the bitter battles of 1897-8.
Thus on every side, and in varying degrees, the world of 1900 was
slipping away from laissez-faire towards collective or state interference.
Even allowing that laissez-faire had always been in some sense a Civitas
Dei of the economists whose ideas of perfect freedom and competition had
been but dimly reflected in the Civitas terrena of statesmen, bureaucrats
and businessmen, the change since 1870 was a real one. Yet it is doubtful
whether more than a handful of thinkers pondered the larger changes in
the economic nature of things. Even those who were paid to think and
write on such matters were hardly yet trend-minded. For most people, eco-
nomic issues were something immediate, to be treated empirically. In
Britain, as the century ended, war in South Africa seemed to most people
more important than economic prophecy. Gold was coming into the bank,
the money market looked more hopeful. In Germany, trade was very satis-
factory. There was a shortage of coal wagons. America was prosperous.
The Victorians brooded less on economic matters than on many other
things and the ending of the most revolutionary century known to man-
kind provoked few thoughts more profound than these: ‘Trade was never
better, wages were never so good, nor were there ever fewer workmen
unemployed.’ So wrote The Times on 30 December 1899.
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CHAPTER III
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
S cience and technology were far more closely related between 1870
and 1900 than in any earlier period. In the last three decades of the
nineteenth century there were few branches of industry that were not
affected by new scientific discoveries, although this is by no means the
same as saying that traditional empirical methods were entirely or even
largely ousted. Empiricism remained dominant in many industries; in
some it remains so to the present day; but after 1870 we can clearly see the
beginnings of the scientific industry of the twentieth century. The changed
outlook is naturally more apparent in the new industries — such as the
electrical industry — that originated wholly in scientific discovery than in
those, already long established, in which the application of science resulted
to a great extent in improving old processes rather than in creating quite
new ones.
While the close relationship between science and technology within this
period is evident, it is in many instances exceedingly difficult to distinguish
cause from effect. Sometimes a purely scientific discovery, resulting from
research with no practical objective in mind, was of such obvious practical
importance that its commercial development followed almost as a matter
of course. The development of the dyestuffs industry was a conspicuous
example: the first coal-tar dye was the result of an unsuccessful — and, as
we now know, wholly misguided — attempt to synthesise quinine. Other
scientific discoveries, however, became significant primarily because con-
temporary conditions favoured their application; in different circum-
stances their historical significance might have been slight, or have been
apparent at a much later date. For example, the widespread introduction
of the steam-turbine into ships was not directly due to the need of marine
engineers for a different kind of motive power. It was due primarily to the
fact that the new electrical generating industry required a steam-engine
capable of running very much faster than the reciprocating steam-engine.
While this was a period in which science and technology were jointly
changing the course of history, both were also advancing separately. In
science this was a fruitful period for what is commonly called pure — as
opposed to applied — research and many discoveries were made that
contributed to the sum of human knowledge but had no immediate effect
on the course of events. Mendeleef, for example, formulated his famous
periodic table of the elements in 1869 but the profound significance of
this, particularly in relationship to the structure of atoms, was discerned
only by a later generation : many of his contemporaries, indeed, received
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his ideas with the greatest scepticism. Organic compounds of silicon were
well known and being closely investigated before the close of the century,
but it was the military needs of the second World War that made them of
practical importance and introduced the term silicone into common usage.
Just as science could advance on its own, so could technology. The
internal combustion engine, destined to revolutionise transport on land,
was originally developed almost entirely empirically by practical and
determined men who had little or no knowledge of current scientific
developments. Equally, the new petroleum industry, essential companion
to motor-car manufacture, was built up not by scientists but by men with
a talent for improvisation and a keen commercial sense.
Since many technological advances resulted from fundamental scientific
research it is appropriate to discuss the main lines of scientific progress
before considering the profound changes in industry that occurred at the
same time. Although we must in the main consider the period 1870-1900
it will also be necessary to consider some earlier events, for this thirty-year
period is not of any particular significance so far as the history of science
is concerned. These were very active years in science, but many of the
important discoveries stemmed from earlier researches. While techno-
logical progress was to a considerable extent shaped by events of historical
importance in the world at large, it would be fair to say that science on the
whole developed in isolation. This state of affairs continued until well
past the turn of the century.
In many branches of physics this was a period of intense activity and it
is difficult to single out any particular field of research as being of excep-
tional historical significance. It would be generally agreed, however, that
progress in thermodynamics and in electromagnetic theory was of par-
ticular importance for the future development of physics generally.
Although it had excited speculation from the earliest times, the true
nature of heat and its relationship to mechanical motion began to be clear
little more than a century ago. The caloric theory, which visualised heat as
some kind of imponderable fluid, still found adherents in the midst of the
nineteenth century, just as in chemistry the phlogiston theory of com-
bustion lingered on long after the researches of Lavoisier and others had
demonstrated the true nature of the theory of combustion. Such funda-
mental concepts as the difference between heat and temperature also took
a surprisingly long time to establish. By 1870, however, the important
principles had been established that heat is a form of energy and that in
all ordinary physical processes energy is conserved — that is, if one form of
energy disappears an exactly equivalent amount of another form appears.
The theory of the conservation of energy was of as much fundamental
importance as the earlier theory of the conservation of mass. Until the
end of the nineteenth century physics was based on the assumption that
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conservation of mass and conservation of energy were two universal but
separate laws. The unification of these two theories into one of still more
fundamental importance — the conservation of mass/energy — belongs to
our own century but, as we shall see, the seeds of this profoundly im-
portant generalisation were sown within the period with which we are
now concerned.
Clarification of ideas on the nature of heat led to the establishment of
the laws of thermodynamics, a subject which broadly speaking concerns
itself with the laws governing the conversion of heat into work, and vice
versa. The first law relates to the conservation of energy. The second,
formulated in 1851, states that there is a theoretical limit to the efficiency
of any heat engine. The third states, in effect, that the more it is trans-
formed the less heat-energy is available for doing useful work. The deriva-
tion of these laws and discussion of their application lies far beyond the
scope of a general work such as this, where it must suffice to say that these
seemingly simple generalisations have been profoundly useful in studying
all kinds of processes involving heat energy in any way, whether they
relate to steam-engines or chemical reactions. As a scientific tool their
importance was very quickly realised — as for example in Willard Gibbs’
(1839-1903) formulation in 1876 of the Phase Rule, an exceedingly im-
portant physico-chemical generalisation. But their great technological
importance was only gradually recognised.
The researches of Michael Faraday (1791-1867) established the relation-
ship between electricity and magnetism which, among its other important
consequences, made possible the establishment of the electrical industry.
His laws were, however, established empirically, and it was left to James
Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) to make the important further step of expressing
Faraday’s ideas in terms of mathematical theory, and to establish the
quantitative relationship between the basic units of electricity and mag-
netism. He deduced a theoretical value for the velocity of electromagnetic
waves and found that this was approximately the same as the velocity of
light. From this it could be concluded that light itself is an electro-
magnetic phenomenon. Maxwell’s work, which appears in its fully
developed form in his Electricity and Magnetism (1873), was at once
accepted in Britain, but it was so far removed from current conceptions
that on the Continent it attracted much less attention. Its acceptance there
was due in large measure to the brilliant researches of Heinrich Hertz
(1857-94), who discovered the electric (radio) waves whose existence
Maxwell had deduced as a necessary consequence of his theory. Hertz
established the essential similarity of electric and light waves and showed
that they travelled, within the accuracy of his experiments, at the same
speed. The practical importance of Hertz’s work in the present century
needs no emphasis. The firm establishment of the wave theory of light, for
which Young and Fresnel had advanced strong experimental evidence at
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the beginning of the century, represented the first break in Newtonian
physics.
Controversy about the true nature of light did not hinder the experi-
mental study of its properties. Of these its velocity was of particular
interest because this proved, as indicated above, to be a physical constant
of great importance in electricity. An accurate knowledge of its value was
necessary, for example, for the design of submarine cables. Astronomical
methods had been used since 1676, but the first determination over
relatively short distances on the Earth was made by A. H. L. Fizeau
(1819-96) in 1849. Subsequent determinations led to the famous experi-
ment of Michelson,' carried out in 1887. This yielded the unexpected result
that the observed velocity is independent of the motion of the source.
This experiment was of critical importance for the formulation of the
restricted theory of relativity advanced by Einstein in 1905. This led in
1915 to his general theory of relativity, which is at the very foundation of
atomic physics.
Newton’s well-known experiments with glass prisms had established
that sunlight, and virtually all other light normally encountered, is in fact
composed of light of several different colours. In the latter half of the
nineteenth century the spectroscopic analysis of light was very highly
developed and used to give detailed information about the nature of the
source emitting the light. Notable pioneers were R. W. von Bunsen
(1811-99) and O. R. Kirchhoff (1824-87). Their work made possible the
detection of many chemical elements even in exceedingly tiny amounts.
This method led to the discovery of two new chemical elements, caesium
and rubidium. The most striking results, however, were achieved in the
astronomical field, for it was clear that detailed spectroscopic analysis of
the light emitted by the sun and stars could give a wealth of information
about their chemical composition. In 1878 Sir Joseph Lockyer (1836-
1920) observed in the green region of the solar spectrum a line corre-
sponding to no element known to occur on earth. With great confidence
he and Sir Edward Frankland (1825-99) predicted the presence in the sun
of a new element, which they named helium. Their confidence was
strikingly vindicated in 1895 when Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916) dis-
covered helium in the mineral cleveite. Within a few years four other
unknown gaseous elements had been discovered.
Spectroscopic astronomy became increasingly important. Among those
who made notable contributions was Sir William Huggins (1824-1910)
who was a pioneer in the application for astronomical research of the well-
known Doppler effect. The latter depends upon the fact that when the
source of a wave and an observer are in relative motion the observed
frequency is different from when they are stationary, the difference being
a measure of the relative velocity. In the case of stars, their movement
relative to the earth can thus be measured by precise measurements on
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their spectra. These measurements greatly increased knowledge of stellar
motions and form the basis of modern cosmological theory. In 1 885 J. J.
Balmer (1825-98) for the first time showed that the frequencies of certain
spectral lines (those of hydrogen) had a simple mathematical relationship.
Although atomic physics in its modem sense is essentially a develop-
ment of the twentieth century, its beginnings can be clearly seen in the
latter part of the nineteenth. The critically important Michelson experi-
ment on the velocity of light, for example, has already been mentioned.
Equally significant was the discovery of X-rays in 1 895 by W. K. Roentgen
(1845-1923): apart from their medical importance these rays were sub-
sequently used with great effect to determine the atomic structure of
crystals. In the following year A. H. Becquerel (1852-1908) discovered
that uranium compounds emitted a penetrating radiation, so laying the
foundations of the study of radioactivity. In 1898 the Curies isolated
radium from pitchblende.
The three final decades of the nineteenth century were no more a well-
defined historical period in biology than they were in physics. They were
years of great activity, during which important discoveries were made and
new ideas were formulated, but all this stemmed from earlier days and
continued without a break into the twentieth century. Two developments
were of outstanding importance. The theory of organic evolution, first
clearly formulated by Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Alfred Russell
Wallace (1823-1913) in 1858, became firmly established — thanks in large
measure to the brilliant advocacy of T. H. Huxley (1825-95) — after
intense controversy. Although his work remained virtually unknown until
1900, Gregor Mendel (1822-89) had discovered the mechanism by which
natural evolution worked. Secondly, the doctrine of vitalism became
increasingly unfashionable. According to this doctrine the processes of
life are not to be explained in terms of the laws that govern the inanimate
universe, but demand the existence of some inexplicable ‘vital principle’.
The exploration of both these lines of thought naturally brought scientists
into direct conflict with the Church. The famous dispute between Bishop
Wilberforce and Huxley at the British Association meeting in Oxford in
i860 was by no means an isolated incident.
It is not to be supposed, however, that Darwin’s theory of organic
evolution by natural selection gained the immediate and unqualified sup-
port of the scientific world, even though earlier biologists had done much
to prepare men’s minds for the new ideas. Among them may be men-
tioned Etienne Saint-Hilaire, Robert Chambers and, better known,
Lamarck. It is an interesting example of the cross-fertilisation of ideas,
however, that Darwin’s main debt to his predecessors was not to a biolo-
gist but to an economist. In his autobiography he recorded that it was
Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798) that gave him his first clear concep-
tion of how evolution might work.
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It was characteristic of the age that although Darwin first conceived his
theory in 1838 he made no attempt to publish it, but devoted the next
twenty years of his life to the intensive collection of evidence to support or
refute it. Even when, in 1858, he received from Wallace a communication
containing the gist of his own theory, he was reluctant to claim priority.
Eventually joint publication was arranged through the Linnean Society.
Darwin then marshalled his vast collection of evidence in his Origin of
Species , unquestionably one of the greatest contributions to human
thought ever written.
The theory of evolution revolutionised biological thought. It not only
gave new significance to the vast amount of existing knowledge, but it
provided a logical basis for many new lines of inquiry. Among those who
benefited notably were the anthropologists, who were enabled to see some
pattern in the distribution of the various races of mankind, and the geo-
logists, for whom was provided a logical interpretation of the fossil record.
The doctrine of vitalism has a natural philosophic appeal and, of course,
still finds many adherents. Nevertheless, the latter part of the nineteenth
century provided much evidence against it. Growing knowledge of the
basic principles of physics and chemistry made it possible to explain many
vital processes, such as respiration and digestion, in purely physical terms.
Belief in spontaneous generation was exploded, notably by the work of
Louis Pasteur (1822-95) in France, and it was demonstrated that certain
substances, such as urea, that were characteristic of living organisms,
could be made in the laboratory. Ferments, such as those in yeast that
convert sugar into alcohol, were proved to be active after separation from
the living cells in which they normally exist. The law of the conservation of
energy was shown to apply to living beings as well as to inanimate ones.
When so much could be explained without recourse to vitalism it seemed
logical to suppose that all could be so explained. This inevitably brought
further conflict between science and the Church. But it was by no means
only on religious thought that the theory of evolution had far-reaching
repercussions outside science itself. Philosophic, and thence political,
thought was also affected in certain important respects. To some, the
ultimate logical deduction from the principle of the survival of the fittest
was that the basic moral values are not those that make for survival.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), for example, denounced religion and
looked for the creation of a race of supermen as a result of the forcible
self-assertion of the strongest. His championing of the ‘morals of
masters’ is generally agreed to have had a considerable influence on the
growth in Germany of the attitude of mind that led her into two world wars.
Advocacy of brute strength and selfishness, the view that mankind and
all living beings must be remorselessly ‘red in tooth and claw’, was one
consequence of general interest in evolutionary theory. Precisely the
opposite view was also derived from it. Moral instincts, it was argued,
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make for communal stability and thus promote survival : one consequence
of natural selection should therefore be to increase and perpetuate moral
instincts in human communities.
While the formulation of the theory of evolution was the greatest
feature of nineteenth-century biology and caused intense controversy about
man’s place in the universe, great progress was made in other fields of
biology without much assistance from it. Outstandingly important was
the work on micro-organisms in which Pasteur was so notable a pioneer.
Clarification of ideas about the growth and function of micro-organisms —
in which the improvement of the microscope played an important part —
had far-reaching consequences.
Pasteur demonstrated that certain diseases, such as anthrax and silk-
worm disease, were caused by specific micro-organisms. This paved the
way for important medical developments. Joseph Lister (1827-1912)
found Pasteur’s views complementing his own on the possibility of pre-
venting death from infection in surgery and childbirth. Infections were
first prevented from developing by antiseptic techniques — the liberal use
of bactericidal substances such as carbolic acid. Later, aseptic techniques
were introduced in which infective agents were eliminated by extreme
cleanliness. These developments came most opportunely, for the earlier
discovery and use of anaesthetics had made possible surgical operations
that were hitherto impossible, but the effect of this had to a great extent
been nullified by the subsequent high mortality from infection. Anaes-
thesia, coupled with the extensive use of antiseptic and aseptic techniques,
effected a revolution in medical practice. The revolution was not achieved
without much opposition. Opposition by the Church to one of the most
valuable uses of anaesthesia, namely for the relief of pain in childbirth,
had only just died down in 1870. The tide had turned only when chloro-
form was administered to Queen Victoria by John Snow during the birth
of Prince Leopold in 1853. Lister’s methods escaped the criticism of the
Church, but not of his own colleagues, many of whom derided his ideas.
By the end of the century, however, the principles of modern surgery had
been firmly established.
Increasing knowledge of the nature of disease had other important
practical consequences. By the end of the century most of the important
pathogenic bacteria had been identified, as well as some of the disease-
causing protozoa. The causal agent of malaria, for example, was dis-
covered in 1880 and seventeen years later Sir Ronald Ross identified the
Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of the disease. In the hands of masters
such as Robert Koch (1843-1910) and Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) the newly
developed aniline dyes proved immensely valuable for the identification of
bacteria by differential staining methods. Such staining methods were,
incidentally, also of great value in the microscopic examination of a wide
range of biological material.
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This discovery of the differential affinity of various tissues for dyes led
to the foundation of the branch of science known as chemotherapy — the
conquest of disease within the body by means of chemical agents that are
highly toxic to the invading micro-organisms but harmless to the tissues of
the patient. Ehrlich conceived the idea of such a ‘ magic bullet ’ that would
kill the microbes of diseases but leave the body unharmed. Although no
notable success was achieved in this field until the discovery of salvarsan in
1909, the foundations of chemotherapy were laid in the last two decades of
the nineteenth century. The modem sulphonamides and antibiotics trace
their descent from work done then.
By 1876 it was well known that certain of the effects of pathogenic
micro-organisms were due to their production of specific toxins, and by
1888 certain of these toxins had been obtained in a purified state. These
developments led to much improvement in the techniques of immunisa-
tion. Diphtheria toxin, for example, can be introduced into a horse whose
tissues will then produce antitoxin. Serum from the blood of a horse so
treated can be used to immunise against diphtheria. Pasteur, again,
showed that rabies could be prevented by appropriate inoculation.
Certain aspects of chemical discovery have already been referred to, and
this is not surprising in view of its position as the most basic of the sciences.
Reference has been made, for example, to the use of the spectroscope in
chemical analysis, to the elucidation of the chemical nature of the respira-
tory process, and to the synthesis of chemotherapeutic agents. The whole
of chemistry developed enormously during this time, but undoubtedly the
most important progress was in organic chemistry, for here a whole new
world was unfolded.
As its name implies, organic chemistry was originally concerned with
the wide range of substances that can be obtained from plant or animal
material, and originally thought to be obtainable only from these sources.
Wohler’s discovery in 1828 that he could prepare urea artificially —
‘without requiring a kidney or an animal, either man or dog’ — opened a
new era, in which, however, the old nomenclature was retained. Virtually
all the constituents of living matter are compounds of the element carbon:
this is generally associated with only a limited number of the other ninety-
one elements that occur in nature, the principal ones being nitrogen,
oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. From being specifically con-
cerned with substances present in biological material, organic chemistry
gradually came to include also the rapidly increasing number of purely
synthetic compounds of carbon that have no natural counterpart. Organic
chemistry became in fact the chemistry of one single element, carbon.
From 1828 onwards a large number of new organic substances were
synthesised and clear ideas began to emerge about the way in which these,
the atoms of carbon, were disposed relative to each other and to the atoms
of the other elements. For some forty years research proceeded steadily
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and by 1870 most of the important principles of modern organic chemistry
had been established. In 1856, however, there occurred an event which
profoundly affected the development of chemistry, and of the chemical
industry, for the remainder of the century and, indeed, up to the present
day. In that year William Perkin (1838-1907) was seeking to synthesise
the important drug quinine. Not surprisingly he failed, for he was using
a method which we now know could have had no hope of success. He
did, however, synthesise mauveine, the first synthetic aniline dye, and
thereby both created a new industry and gave a great stimulus to organic
chemical research.
As has been remarked, Perkin’s discovery of mauveine was accidental.
So also was the original synthesis of alizarin by Heinrich Caro (1834—
1910): he was called away at a critical moment in an experiment, the
mixture overheated, and he returned to find a charred residue which had,
however, a pink crust of the dye he was seeking. Much of the organic
chemistry of the day was in fact semi-empirical, but such a wealth of new
substances lay ready for discovery that the acute observer could reap a
rich harvest. At the same time, however, important theoretical progress
was being made. Of outstanding importance was the elucidation by
Friedrich Kekule (1829-96) of the structure of benzene. This substance is
of the most fundamental importance, for from it derive tens of thousands
of different chemical substances, the so-called ‘aromatics’, such as dyes
and drugs. The molecule of benzene is very simple, consisting only of six
carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms. For a long time no arrangement of
these twelve atoms was conceived that was consistent with the chemical
properties of benzene. It was Kekule who found the right answer : that the
six carbon atoms were arranged not in a straight or branched chain but in
a circle. This seemingly trifling suggestion — which now seems obvious —
transformed chemical thought in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Another important field of theoretical development was that of stereo-
chemistry. The classic researches of Louis Pasteur (1822-95) had estab-
lished the fundamentally important fact that certain substances, such as
tartaric acid, could exist in two forms that were chemically indistinguishable
but nevertheless had important physical differences, especially in their
effect on polarised light. This difference was commonly manifested by the
fact that a crystal of one form was the mirror-image of a crystal of the
other : one type of crystal could be looked upon as a left-hand glove and
the other as the right-hand member of the same pair. Such scarcely dis-
cernible differences might seem of trifling consequence, but in fact they
are profoundly important, especially in the chemistry of vital processes.
Thus the human body derives much of its energy from one stereoisomer of
the sugar ‘glucose’: the other stereoisomer cannot be so utilised.
The proper interpretation of Pasteur’s discovery was due to the work of
two young chemists, J. A. Le Bel (1897-1930) and J. H. Van ’t Hoff
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(1852-1911). They established that this phenomenon arises from the fact
that the atoms that make up molecules are arranged according to a strict
geometric pattern, and that the valencies of the carbon atom — that is, the
bonds by which it is linked to other atoms — are so directed in space that in
certain molecules two geometrically different arrangements are possible
for the same group of atoms. Van ’t Hoff first published his conclusions
in 1874: they were first ignored and then ridiculed. More than a year
elapsed before the great German chemist Johannes Wislicenns (1835-
1902) saw their great importance and lent his support.
The name of Van ’t Hoff is also very intimately associated with another
important chemical development, that of the theory of solutions. His
experiments on osmosis established the fact that when a solid is dissolved
in a liquid its particles behave in much the same way as if they were the
particles of a gas occupying the same volume as the solution. By this
means it is possible, for example, to explain such important botanical
phenomena as the uptake of minerals from the soil and the rise of sap in
trees. This conception presented major difficulties, however, when applied
to solutions of the important substances known as electrolytes, so-called
because their aqueous solutions conduct electricity. Typical of such sub-
stances is common salt, sodium chloride. To explain the properties of
such substances the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) ad-
vanced the revolutionary hypothesis that in solution the molecules of
such substances dissociate into what are called ions — that is, electrically
charged atoms of the components of the molecule. Thus sodium chloride,
he said, exists in solution as positively charged atoms of sodium and
negatively charged atoms of chlorine. This brilliant hypothesis Arrhenius
incorporated, with great misgivings, in his thesis for his doctorate at
Uppsala. His misgivings were well founded : his thesis earned him a fourth-
class degree, only a shade better than complete failure. The difficulty, as
Arrhenius had foreseen, was that chemists of the day could not appreciate
that electrically charged atoms might have properties totally different
from neutral ones. Sodium was well known to react most violently with
water and the suggestion that any form of sodium atom could exist in the
presence of water seemed too ridiculous to be entertained. Not until a
copy of the thesis reached Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), professor of
chemistry at Riga, did it find a reader discerning and influential enough to
ensure its serious consideration. Arrhenius ultimately had an opportunity
of working with Ostwald, with Van ’t Hoff, and with other great European
chemists and of perfecting his theory of ionic dissociation in solution.
The collaboration with Van ’t Hoff was particularly important, for
Arrhenius’ theory completely explained the anomalous osmotic pressures
of solutions of electrolytes. Nevertheless, many chemists still refused to
accept the views of the barbarous ‘Ionians’. Not until 1890, some seven
years after Ostwald had first championed Arrhenius, may the opposition
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be said to have been finally routed. The circumstances are worth recalling,
as a reminder that science is by no means a cold and logical pursuit but is
subject, like all other human activities, to human weaknesses. Arrhenius,
Ostwald, and Van ’t Hoff were invited to expound their theories to a
meeting of the British Association in Leeds in 1 890, the confident belief
being that they would not stand the force of orthodox opinion and would
be discredited. In point of fact, precisely the opposite occurred : the views
of the ‘Ionians’ prevailed.
When turning to technology it is worth while to stress once more that
the present tendency to look upon it as being synonymous with applied
science is altogether wrong, for many branches of technology were highly
developed long before science in its modem sense was born. From the
seventeenth century onward, science became increasingly important in
industry, but even at the end of the nineteenth century many important
processes had changed little, if at all, as a result of scientific discovery.
Progress there certainly was, but in the main it was achieved empirically
through better design, craftsmanship, and managerial enterprise. Where
scientific ideas were adopted, this was often done slowly and grudgingly.
Nevertheless, in certain fields scientific discovery had immediate and
dramatic effects, creating new industries where none existed before. Most
striking in this respect was the electrical industry, which provided entirely
new sources of light, heat, power, and communication. This industry is
most conveniently considered under three separate headings : generation,
distribution and utilisation. Although this is a rather arbitrary separation
— for example, the mode of distribution may be determined by the mode
of generation — it at least corresponds to a division of effort and interest
that still exists in the industry.
In the present context we are concerned, in the main, with the mechanical
generation of electricity as opposed to the much older, but still important,
production by chemical changes in batteries. The principles of electro-
magnetism were established by Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who showed
that an electrical potential is produced when a conductor moves in a
magnetic field. Although the first mechanical generators of electricity
appeared in Paris as early as 1832, the first apparently being by Hippolyte
Pixii, it was many years before generators were sufficiently powerful and
reliable for the latent practical possibilities of electricity to be realised.
The earliest generators were activated by permanent magnets, and the
primary current generated was of what is called the alternating type, that
is to say, its direction changed or alternated several times a second. This
alternation of the current was at first looked upon with disfavour, prob-
ably because all the early workers were more familiar with the direct
current produced by batteries, and equipment was designed to rectify it
or render it uni-directional. The rectifying equipment was, however, a
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frequent source of trouble and it was gradually realised that for many
purposes alternating current was not only quite as useful as direct current
but could have certain technical advantages, especially from the point of
view of transmission. Alternating generators were displayed in 1 88 1 at the
Paris Exhibition and by the end of the century were in widespread use.
Controversy over the relative merits of alternating and direct current
raged for a long time and was not finally resolved until after the end of the
century. Rather earlier than this, there had been another very important
departure from the original designs. This was the introduction of the
principle of self-excitation. The permanent magnets of the early machines
were replaced by electromagnets activated by diverting part of the elec-
tricity generated by the machine itself.
The large-scale generation of electricity, whether direct or alternating,
was firmly established by the i88o’s. The Edison Company’s power station
at Holbom Viaduct, which came into operation in 1882, was the first to
supply private customers. Within a few years a host of power stations had
been established, many of them designed to supply one or a few large
customers — for example, local authorities, for street-lighting — but also
selling to private customers. In the main, these were designed for purely
local supply. Among the first to realise that the future of the electrical
generating industry lay in much bigger power stations, designed to supply
large areas, was Ziani de Ferranti (1864-1930), whose design for the
Deptford generating plant was far in advance of its time. This came into
full operation in 1891. Most of the early power stations were steam-
driven ; one of the first big hydro-electric schemes was that at Niagara Falls,
begun in 1893.
The development of the electrical generating industry was greatly
influenced by the growing problems of distribution to the growing number
of consumers. It was this consideration that finally led to the replacement
in large measure of direct by alternating current. Transmission losses are
much less at high voltages than at low and it is technically easier to
generate high-voltage alternating current than high-voltage direct current.
High-voltage alternating current can be reduced to the low voltage
required for many practical applications by means of the simple non-
mechanical devices known as transformers. These came into general use
in the power industry in the 1880’s. The distribution of large quantities of
electricity at high voltages presented many problems in cable design,
especially from the point of view of insulation. For the Deptford power
station Ferranti introduced the coaxial copper tube.
Among the earliest important applications of electricity was for lighting,
especially in lighthouses, where a very bright source was important. Here
the most important development was the arc-light, in which an electric
spark is struck between two electrodes. Arc-lights were installed in the
South Foreland lighthouse in 1858 and at Dungeness four years later.
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Even the smallest arc-lamps were too powerful for domestic use, but they
were soon widely used for larger installations. Electric lighting was intro-
duced into a mill at Miilhausen in 1875 and a year later was in use at
La Chapelle station in France. The first English installation was at the
Gaiety Theatre in 1878.
Electric lighting became widespread following the introduction of the
incandescent filament lamp, in the early development of which Joseph
Swan (1828-1914) and Thomas Edison (1847-1931) were particularly
active. The availability of this simple, cheap, and effective source of light
rapidly led to the widespread introduction of electric lighting. As early as
1880 Edison was manufacturing at the rate of 5000 lamps per month.
Within a very few years, incandescent filament lamps were being widely
used in buildings of every type and size. Electric lighting was much
superior to gas lighting, which in its day had been so revolutionary, as
long as this depended upon fish-tail and similar burners. Gas lighting
became competitive again with the introduction of the Welsbach incan-
descent mantle in 1886.
The electric motor is essentially an electrical generator working in
reverse. Although Faraday demonstrated its principle as early as 1821, the
first electric motor of practical significance came on the market only in
1873. This was a direct-current machine: alternating-current motors were
not available until 1888. The motor found early application for traction.
The first electric railway was demonstrated in 1879 in Berlin, and the first
electrified London underground railway was built in 1887-90. In 1895 the
first main-line railway conversion from steam to electricity took place:
this very significant innovation was on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
The use of electric traction on the roads depended — except for trams —
upon the development of electrical storage batteries, or accumulators,
which alone could supply, independently of external connections, the
necessary heavy current. The Plante accumulator appeared about 1880
and an electric-tricycle appeared in 1882. A fleet of electric taxi-cabs
appeared briefly on London streets between 1897 and 1899 and a variety
of electric carriages appeared in the last decade of the century. The
limitations of electric storage-batteries severely limited their use, however,
and still do.
Technologically the most important application of the electric motor —
and perhaps of electricity generally — is in its use as a small, powerful, and
mobile power unit for use in the factory. Although the beginning of this
application is just discernible at the very end of the nineteenth century, it
is in the main a twentieth-century development and as such does not
further concern us here. Electric telegraphy and telephony are conveni-
ently considered at this point, although their consumption of electricity is
relatively small. The exceptional importance of speedy communication
needs no stressing now, and was generally appreciated by 1870. The first
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telegraph line, between Paddington and West Drayton, had been estab-
lished in 1839 and by 1870 an extensive network of telegraphic communi-
cations existed. Important developments had been the use of rubber as an
insulating material for wires, the introduction of relay systems for
communication over long distances, and the building of telegraph ex-
changes. Telegraphic communication between the Old World and the
New was first established in 1858, but a satisfactory cable was not laid
until 1865. Electric telephony was first demonstrated in 1861, but the intro-
duction of the telephone as a practical instrument was due to Alexander
Graham Bell (1847-1922), whose first patent was filed in 1876. Commer-
cial telephony was established in Britain in 1878 and London had its first
telephone exchange in the following year. Practical wireless telegraphy
was a twentieth-century development, but the basic experiments were
carried out before 1900. Heinrich Hertz (1857-94) demonstrated the
principle as early as 1887. By 1895 Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) had
sent and received messages over a distance of a mile, and by 1901 he had
bridged the Atlantic: Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company was
founded in 1897.
The electrical industry was directly linked with the chemical industry, at
this time expanding rapidly. Some of the chemical effects of electricity
had long been known: for example, in 1807 Humphry Davy isolated
sodium by the electrolysis of fused caustic soda. The industrial utilisation
of these effects had to await the availability of cheap, regular and abund-
ant supplies of electricity. Once this condition was fulfilled, the electro-
chemical industry grew rapidly. The availability of electricity was the
direct cause of the rapid commercial exploitation of a metal, aluminium,
that had been known for a great many years but had previously been too
expensive for its many valuable properties to be effectively utilised. In the
middle years of the nineteenth century aluminium was made by a process
involving the reduction of aluminium chloride with sodium, but the high
price of sodium and the general difficulties of operating the process made
the resulting aluminium so expensive that it could be used only for luxury
goods. In the 1880’s H. Y. Castner (1858-99) devised a cheaper method
for the manufacture of sodium which made commercial aluminium pro-
duction a feasibility, and a factory for the purpose was established in
Birmingham. Almost at once, however, Castner’s process was made
obsolete by an electrolytic one developed independently in 1886 by C. M.
Hall (1863-1914) in America, and by P. L. T. Heroult (1863-1914) in
France. In this new process aluminium was made by the electrolysis of
bauxite, the commonly occurring oxide of aluminium, dissolved in molten
cryolite. Within a very few years aluminium, which for so long had been
little more than a scientific curiosity, came into extensive use. The electrical
industry and the chemical industry between them together were responsible
for making available the first new constructional metal for many years.
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As has been mentioned, Castner’s process for the manufacture of
aluminium became obsolete almost as it was established. The consequence
to him at first appeared to be almost fatal, for his sole asset was a cheap
method of manufacturing sodium and the necessary market for this had
gone. However, he very quickly devised chemical processes to utilise the
sodium. Among his products was sodium cyanide, which found a large
market in the developing gold fields, in Australia, America, South Africa,
and elsewhere. He was so successful in these operations that in a short
time he had to extend his sodium-manufacturing capacity. In doing this
he turned his attention to manufacture by electrochemical process, and in
particular by the electrolysis of fused sodium hydroxide. He found, how-
ever, that the best sodium hydroxide that he could buy commercially at
that time contained so much impurity as to make the process he finally
devised unworkable. Accordingly he set about devising a process for the
manufacture of practically pure sodium hydroxide, by the electrolysis of
brine. As a result he was able both to meet his own needs and to put on
the market sodium hydroxide of almost ioo per cent purity, a product
then almost unknown in the alkaline trade. Caustic soda, much stronger
than the ordinary domestic variety, is required for many industrial pur-
poses, especially for soap-making. As a by-product of this manufacture
large quantities of chlorine were produced, and this was converted into
bleaching powder for which the textile industry, among others, had a
large demand. The success of the electrolytic process for the manufacture
of caustic soda led to its being worked in the United States, and in 1896 a
works was built at Niagara, where abundant cheap electricity was avail-
able as a result of the big hydro-electric scheme that had been established
three years earlier.
These and other electrochemical developments were, however, only
some of the big technological changes that took place in the chemical
industry in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Of outstand-
ing importance were the new methods for the manufacture of soda and
sulphuric acid, both products of very great industrial importance. For
very many years soda had been almost exclusively manufactured, from
salt, by the Leblanc process. This had a number of inherent disadvantages.
In particular, it was dirty, giving rise to vast quantities of offensive waste
whose disposal was difficult : it produced clouds of hydrochloric acid gas :
and it required large quantities of fuel. While noteworthy improvements
were made in the process, especially in recovering chlorine from the
hydrochloric acid and converting it into bleaching powder, increasing
attention was paid to an alternative process, called the ammonia-soda
process. This, too, started from salt as the basic raw material, but used
ammonia as an intermediary. Although very simple in principle, the per-
fection of the process as a commercial proposition took many years. The
first attempts were made in the i830’s, but it was not until 1861 that a
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Belgian chemist, Ernest Solvay (1838-1922) lodged the patent on which
subsequent industrial operations were built. Even so, it was not until
1867 that the first factory, at Couillet, was working satisfactorily. Further
key patents were lodged in 1872. In that year Ludwig Mond (1829-1909)
and John Brunner (1842-1919) acquired the British rights and established
ammonia-soda works at Winnington, on the Cheshire salt field. Very soon
the process was being worked in the United States, Russia, Germany,
Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy and Canada. From then on the fate of the
Leblanc process was sealed, though it survived until well into the twentieth
century. In 1902 world production of soda was 1,800,000 tons, and of this
no less than 1,650,000 tons were made by the Solvay process.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century another very old-
established industrial chemical process found its first serious rival.
Hitherto sulphuric acid had been manufactured by the lead-chamber
process. The process was considerably improved during the nineteenth
century, but no fundamental changes were made. As early as 1831
Peregrine Phillips, a Bristol vinegar manufacturer, had lodged a patent
for an alternative, and simpler, process. In this, sulphur dioxide was con-
verted directly to sulphur trioxide through the intermediary of a substance,
itself unchanged in the operation, known as a catalyst. The resulting
sulphur trioxide could be converted into sulphuric acid by direct reaction
with water. Not until 1870, however, were all the technical difficulties of
the process overcome. A factory for working it was established at Silver-
town, and this had a capacity which eventually rose to 1000 tons per week.
Within a few years plants for manufacturing sulphuric acid by the contact
process had been established in many parts of the world. The rapid expan-
sion of the dyestuff's industry gave a great stimulus because the contact
process was able to manufacture a much stronger grade of sulphuric acid
than could be obtained by the lead-chamber process. This high-grade
sulphuric acid, known as oleum, had previously been obtainable virtually
only from works in Bohemia, where it was made from a particular form of
local slate, and its cost was very high. The contact process for making
sulphuric acid did not kill the older lead-chamber process in the same way
as the ammonia-soda process eventually killed the Leblanc, for the two
processes were worked side by side.
During this time very large quantities of sulphuric acid were required
for the rapidly expanding fertiliser industry, and it was particularly
required for the manufacture of superphosphate. Superphosphate was
made by treating bones, or later mineral phosphates, with sulphuric acid.
Manufacture was first undertaken near Dublin by James Murray (1788-
1871) in the early years of the nineteenth century, but it was not until 1843
that John Bennet Lawes (1814-1900) established the first really large
superphosphate factory. This was situated near London, and by the
1870’s its production was about 40,000 tons annually.
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Phosphorus is, of course, only one of the elements required by plants.
Another essential element is nitrogen. During the period with which we
are here concerned the most important source of this was Chile, where
sodium nitrate occurs naturally as caliche. In 1900 world consumption of
sodium nitrate was 1,350,000 tons, by far the greater part of it going to the
agricultural industry. A third essential element for plants is potassium.
Up to approximately 1870 the main source of potassium salts for fertilisers
and for manufacturing purposes was the ash of plants. Wood-ash manu-
facture was particularly important in Canada. In 1871 there were over
500 asheries there, consuming well over 4 million tons of wood a year.
By the end of the century, however, the Canadian industry was virtually
extinguished owing to the working of the vast natural deposits of potas-
sium salts at Stassfurt.
Earlier mention of the need for oleum for dyestuffs manufacture is an
indication of another exceedingly important technological change that
took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Previously, and
indeed up to i860, almost all dyes used in the textile trade were of natural
origin. By the end of the century synthetic dyestuffs had become of very
great importance. This revolutionary change dates from 1856 when
William Perkin discovered the first aniline dyestuff, mauveine. He soon
established its manufacture in Britain, and within a very few years a wide
range of other synthetic dyestuffs was available. Some of these new dyes
were completely novel, others were synthetic versions of the natural dyes
which had been used for many centuries. Among the latter, two discoveries
are of particular interest. In 1869 Perkin in England and Heinrich Caro
(1834-1910) in Germany almost simultaneously lodged patents for the
manufacture of alizarin, the dye present in madder. This development had
immediate disastrous effects on the madder industry. Similarly, the manu-
facture of synthetic indigo, first put on the market in 1 897, almost over-
night put an end to the indigo plantations in India, where some 200,000
acres of land were then devoted to the crop.
More important, perhaps, than these synthetic versions of natural dye-
stuffs were the vast range of new synthetic dyes suitable for dying both
wool and cotton. The introduction of these had a profound effect on the
textile industry generally. Although the synthetic dyestuff industry had
its beginning in Great Britain, there very soon began a drift towards
Germany, and by the end of the century the German dyestuff industry
had secured a dominating position. This was, however, only one example
of the rise of German industry at the end of the nineteenth century; others
are referred to elsewhere.
Another important new branch of the chemical industry was that con-
cerned with the manufacture of what are now called high-explosives. The
highly explosive properties of nitro-glycerine were discovered as early as
1845, but it was many years before safe means of handling this valuable
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substance were worked out. A pioneer in this field was Alfred Nobel
(1833-96), who in the 1860’s invented dynamite, a mixture of nitro-
glycerine and a fine mineral substance known as kieselguhr. Blasting
gelatine came into use in the i88o’s. The introduction of safe forms of
these very powerful explosives naturally had far-reaching effects in the
mining and civil engineering fields. The military consequences were also of
very great importance, and the introduction of nitro-glycerine resulted in
a complete revolution in all kinds of armaments both on land and at sea.
For use as a propellant the two most important forms of nitro-glycerine
during this time were ballistite and cordite. In addition to nitro-glycerine
one other new high explosive was introduced before the end of the cen-
tury. This was picric acid, made by the action of nitric acid on phenol.
Its suitability for filling shells was demonstrated in 1 886.
The electrical and chemical industries have been dealt with at some
length because one was a completely new industry and the other under-
went revolutionary change during the period in question. Both, moreover,
had far-reaching consequences in other branches of technology. At the
same time, however, many of the old-established industries showed im-
portant changes, many of them resulting from the application of scientific
knowledge and scientific method. The metal industry, for example, to
which some passing reference has already been made, showed important
changes, both in methods of extraction and in methods of working. The
introduction of aluminium as a completely new constructional metal was
an event of the first importance. In almost all metallurgical processes the
first necessary stage is to concentrate the original ore in order to remove
unwanted impurities. This process naturally became of increasing im-
portance as the richest and most easily accessible ores were exhausted,
and ores of lower quality had of necessity to be used. Three important
new processes of ore concentration were introduced. In 1895 the Wilfley
process was introduced for concentrating ground ores by agitation in
water on a sloping table fitted with riffles. Flotation separation processes,
in which the finely ground ore is agitated with a mixture of oil and water,
were first suggested in i860 and commercial operation began at the turn
of the century. Both these processes are of the most fundamental import-
ance in modern mining. A third important concentration process resulted
from the ready availability of electricity. This is the process of magnetic
separation, in which the ground ore is passed between the poles of a
powerful electro-magnet.
During this period the demand for copper increased considerably,
because its exceptional conducting qualities made it particularly desirable
for electrical applications. In the main, the production of copper followed
traditional lines, but there was one very important innovation. This was
the introduction of methods of electrolytic refining, again a development
made possible only as electricity became generally available. Only the
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purest forms of copper exhibit the desired electrical properties and this
highly pure form could easily be obtained only by electrolytic methods. The
first electrolytic refinery was established in 1869 in South Wales. Electro-
lytic refining of copper was introduced on the American continent in 1892.
Another metal that assumed greatly increased importance was nickel.
The demand for the metal had been growing slowly since the beginning of
the century, but in 1889 it was demonstrated that the addition of nickel
greatly increased the toughness of steel, and very soon large quantities of
the metal were being used for this purpose. In 1893 an improved process,
known as the Orford ‘tops and bottoms’ process, was announced. The
metal resulting from the Orford process was cast into ingots which were
used as the anode in a further electrolytic process that gave an exception-
ally pure product. In 1890 a completely new process for the extraction of
nickel was described by Ludwig Mond. In this the metal was converted
into a volatile substance known as nickel carbonyl, which could be
decomposed to yield the metal by further heating. By the end of the
century the Mond process had been firmly established commercially. The
increased importance of nickel caused attention to be directed towards
new sources of supply of ore. In 1883 vast deposits were discovered at
Sudbury (Ontario) during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Rail-
way: these were on a scale to alleviate all anxiety for many years to come.
The ability of zinc to prevent the rusting of exposed ironwork led to
greatly increased production of the metal at the end of the century for
galvanising purposes. In i860 a process was devised for the continuous
galvanising of iron wire, and vast quantities of galvanised iron wire were
sent to the newly developing territories abroad. Barbed wire was intro-
duced in the United States about 1880, but was not generally accepted in
Europe until some years later.
In the working of metals the most striking changes were in the increased
mechanisation and, in many branches of the metal industry, in the size of
ingots being handled. The increasing power of mechanisation is strikingly
indicated by the fact that Nasmyth’s original steam-hammer was intro-
duced in 1842: by 1887 a 4000-ton hydraulic press for forging steel ingots
had been installed at Sheffield. In the working of copper, plates weighing
more than 2 tons were being rolled by 1873.
The increased demand for wire for fencing, for the cables of suspension
bridges, and so on, was further stimulated by the rapid extension of electric
telegraph systems and of electricity-distribution systems. The first tele-
graph cables were of iron, but for all electrical work copper very soon
began to be almost exclusively used. Wire-making by drawing through a
die had been practised for many years, but in 1875 multi-block machines
began to appear. To increase output, drawing speeds were increased, and
by 1890 speeds of 1000 feet a minute were being achieved.
We have hitherto considered the non-ferrous metals, for the change in
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the iron and steel industry during this period was so profound as to
deserve separate mention. In 1850 Britain, who at that time was the
world’s greatest producer of ferrous metals, manufactured about 2 % mil-
lion tons of iron, but no more than 60,000 tons of steel. By 1900 some
28 million tons of steel were being manufactured annually in the world
as a whole and the U.S.A. had replaced Great Britain as the principal
producer. During this time steel replaced wrought and cast iron for a
great many constructional purposes. The principal reason for this develop-
ment was the discovery that pig-iron could be converted into steel by
blowing air through it while it was in the molten state. The technical
history of this development is a complicated one, and too detailed and
controversial to enter into here, where it must suffice to say that the
pioneer worker was Henry Bessemer (1813-98), whose process is known
throughout the world. Bessemer converters were built in many countries
from the i86o’s.
A different process, but one which achieved the same result, was devised
by Frederick Siemens (1826-1904). With Siemens was subsequently
associated the French steelmaker, Pierre Martin. The Siemens-Martin
process became widely adopted, and by the turn of the century was prob-
ably more generally used than Bessemer’s. Both the Bessemer and
the open-hearth process suffered from the fundamental disadvantage,
however, that they could not be used with ores containing phosphorus.
This was not a matter of very great consequence to Britain, who had large
deposits of non-phosphoric ores, but it was a grave disadvantage on the
Continent, especially in Belgium, France and Germany. The solution to
this problem was found by Sidney Gilchrist Thomas (1850-85) in 1875,
although it was some years before his invention was generally adopted.
The principle of Thomas’ invention was to line the converter with a basic
substance made by calcining dolomite. When the lining had become
saturated with phosphorus, it was removed and could subsequently be
used as a valuable fertiliser. This invention greatly stimulated the German
steel industry, which from 1871 had taken over the rich iron-ores of
Lorraine. These ores contained much phosphorus and were of little value
to Germany until the introduction of the basic process.
Among the many factors that stimulated the steel industry in the last
half of the nineteenth century was the enormous extension of the world’s
railway systems. Up to about 1880 rails were mostly made of iron, but
from that time onwards steel rails began to be widely introduced, for they
had the great advantage of lasting fifteen to twenty times as long as iron
rails. Steel was also increasingly used for many other purposes. Steel
plates began to be used for boilers about i860. Bessemer steel was quickly
adopted by shipbuilders and the first steel ship crossed the Atlantic in
1863. Despite its advantages to the shipbuilder, however, a decisive move
away from iron ships to steel cannot be discerned before about 1890.
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Steel became a constructional material of the first importance. The first
bridge constructed entirely of steel was laid across the Firth of Forth in
1883-90. The Eiffel Tower, erected in 1889, was constructed from open-
hearth steel made in France. The tall buildings of which American
engineers were pioneers were also made largely of steel by the end of the
century. An outstandingly important development occurred in 1885, when
the Mannesmann process for making seamless steel tubes was introduced.
The enormous increase in steel production was of great importance in
the armament industry. By 1861 it had proved possible to roll wrought-
iron sheets a foot thick, but even this was inadequate against the high-
explosive missiles made possible by the mastery of nitro-glycerine. By
1 892 the Royal Navy had adopted steel sheets for armour-plating, and at
the turn of the century steel plates of very substantial size were being
rolled. At the Krupp works in Germany, for example, steel sheets
12 inches thick and weighing 130 tons could be made.
Some aspects of technological change in connection with transport —
for example, the introduction of steel rails and the substitution of steel
ships for iron ones — have already been referred to. These were only part
of a continuing revolution in transport on both land and sea. On sea, a
new type of steam-engine appeared. In 1897 Sir Charles Parsons (1854—
1931) created a sensation at the naval review at Spithead with the Turbinia,
the first ship ever to be propelled by a steam-turbine. It achieved a
speed of 34^ knots, then a record speed on water. Curiously enough.
Parsons’ original interest in the steam-turbine was not in connection with
marine propulsion at all. His basic interest was in the then rapidly
growing electrical industry in which he saw an urgent need for a steam-
engine capable of running at substantially higher speeds than was possible
with the conventional reciprocating engine. His first turbo-generator was
built in 1884, and by the end of the century the steam-turbine had become
established as the most satisfactory form of steam-engine for electrical
generation. On the railways, which had established a decisive victory over
the canals, the steam-engine was pre-eminent, and had as yet scarcely felt
the challenge of electrical and diesel traction. The seeds of effective com-
petition from road transport had, however, been effectively sown by the
end of the century. Satisfactory petrol and diesel engines had been con-
structed by 1900 and, although motor-cars and motor-lorries were still
sufficiently rare to excite attention, almost all the essentials of modem
vehicles had appeared. It is fair to say that the automobile engineer
of 1900 would see few novel features in the cars of today, although he
would, of course, see very great changes in design and constructional
materials.
Although the demands of road vehicles for oil and petrol were quite
small even up to 1900, the petroleum industry was nevertheless very
firmly established during this time, for certain of its products were
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required in substantial quantity for other purposes. The volatile fractions
of petroleum were in little demand, but the higher fractions, known as
paraffin or kerosene, were used in large quantities for both heating and
lighting. Paraffin stoves first became generally known through the great
Paris Exhibition of 1878, and within the next decade over half a million
were sold. By the end of the century oil was being used extensively for
firing ships’ boilers, and paraffin-burning lamps were used almost through-
out the world. The widespread use of machinery of all kinds led to a great
demand for lubricants, many of which were based on mineral petroleum.
The existence of natural petroleum had been known for a great many
years, and indeed bitumen was known in ancient Mesopotamia. The
modern petroleum industry dates, however, from 1857, when oil-wells
were drilled in Hanover. The real centre of the petroleum industry was,
however, in the United States, where in 1 859 oil was struck at a depth of
70 feet in Pennsylvania. That these oil-wells could be drilled, however,
depended upon earlier technological progress in other fields. Although
deep drilling had been used in China for centuries, it was not widely used
in Europe or in North America until the nineteenth century. The original
incentive to improve techniques was the need for water for agricultural
purposes and for brine for the chemical industry. The original North
American oil-wells were drilled with wrought-iron bits having steel
cutting-edges, and the equipment was driven by steam-engines. In 1864,
however, a very great improvement resulted from the introduction of
diamond-drilling, and as a result, boring to depths of the order of 7000 feet
had been achieved by the end of the century. Early methods of refining
petroleum were crude and inefficient. The manufacturers were interested
primarily in the medium-volatile fraction, paraffin or kerosene. The lighter
fraction, known as gasoline or petrol, was dangerously inflammable
and until the advent of the petrol-engine was largely allowed to run to
waste. Almost until the end of the century, transportation was mainly in
wooden barrels or iron drums. Tanker ships and railway tank-cars began
to appear about 1870.
An industry greatly affected by the changes in road-transport was the
rubber industry, the insulating properties of whose product also made it of
great importance to the electrical industry. It was, however, the demand
for rubber tyres, first solid and then pneumatic, that led to the expansion
of the rubber industry into the vast organisation that exists today. Pneu-
matic tyres were first used on automobiles in 1895, but before this they
were very widely fitted to bicycles, which became widely popular from
about 1885. The first Dunlop pneumatic tyre was manufactured in 1900.
Originally the rubber industry made use of wild rubber obtained
principally from South America, but even before the advent of the tyre
industry this source of supply was proving inadequate. As early as the
middle of the century, plans had been put forward for establishing rubber
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plantations, but it was not until 1870 that such plans began to receive
official consideration. In 1873 the India Office obtained Hevea seeds from
South America and tried to establish plants in Calcutta, but the project
was unsuccessful. In 1876 another attempt was made, and this time a
considerable proportion of the young plants grew to maturity. From this
small beginning arose the now vast plantation rubber industry. By the end
of the century substantial quantities of plantation rubber were being
offered on the London and other international markets.
In the textile industry one extremely important innovation, the wide-
spread introduction of synthetic dyestuffs, has already been considered in
connection with the chemical industry. Although the textile industry was a
relatively conservative one, many other changes took place in it during the
last three decades of the nineteenth century. In the main, it is fair to
describe these as being a tendency towards more and more mechanisation.
Almost all the basic processes underwent some considerable improve-
ment. Perhaps the greatest single innovation was the automatic loom,
which was devised in Am erica by J. H. Northrop in 1890-4. This was,
however, only one example of the application of mechanical methods to
weaving. This period saw the triumph of the power-loom over the hand-
loom, and the old-fashioned dobbie underwent very great changes.
Changing social circumstances created a big demand for floor-covering of
all kinds — linoleum was one of the products of the time — and this led to
much mechanisation in the carpet industry. The royal Axminster power-
loom was developed in the United States in 1876, and was introduced into
Britain two years later. The widespread availability of cheap sewing-
machines heralded the beginning of the ready-made-clothing industry, and
also resulted in the first invasion of the ordinary household by precision
machinery. In spinning, the period was marked by a decisive change
towards the ring-spinning method which is now so extensively used.
Although this method was invented in the United States in 1828, it was
not until 1870 that it was widely adopted in the British textile industry.
By contrast, the hosiery industry adopted mechanisation rather slowly;
even in 1870 most hosiery was made by hand or at least on hand-driven
machines. Thereafter mechanisation became increasingly common. An
important development occurred in 1890 when an American inventor,
R. W. Scott, introduced a knitting-machine which completely made a
stocking save for a small seam across the toe.
The great changes of the nineteenth century, and the steadily increasing
proportion of literacy in the population, naturally fostered a greatly
increased demand for printed matter of all kinds. There were no very
great changes in the method of book-production, but there was a tre-
mendous development in methods of producing newspapers, periodicals,
and other literature of a cheap and relatively ephemeral kind. The greatly
increased demand for newspapers and similar publications demanded
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extensive mechanisation in order to accelerate and cheapen production.
In this field The Times newspaper played a leading role. Bruce’s type-
casting-machine appeared in 1850, but the first really successful machine
of this kind was The Times rotary caster, patented by Frederick Wicks in
1881. T hi s was capable of casting 60,000 characters an hour, making it
unnecessary to break up the type after printing; the type was simply
returned to the foundry, melted, and recast. Mechanical type-composing
presented an insoluble problem to inventors for a great many years. Be-
tween 1822 and 1890 many were designed, but none was wholly satisfac-
tory until the advent of the Linotype machine. This American invention
was remarkable in that it required only one operator. The Linotype
machine appeared in 1890 and in 1900 was in use all over the world. In
London, for example, a score of dailies, and 250 newspapers and periodi-
cals elsewhere, were being set with Linotype machines.
In the realm of printing machines the great development was that of the
rotary printing press, which enormously speeded the work. The incentive
towards designing satisfactory machines of this kind was greatly increased
after 1855 when the newspaper tax was abolished in Britain. As early as
1 846, however, a successful rotary press had been devised. The Philadelphia
Enquirer was printed by a rotary machine in 1865, designed by William
Bullock. The Times was being printed on a rotary press, the famous
Walter press, in 1868. Two years later mechanical cutting and folding of
newspapers began.
The mass-production of literature for popular reading made demands
on the illustrator. At the beginning of our period wooden blocks were still
extensively used, but in 1880 metal blocks began to appear for line
drawings; the Daily Telegraph used them as early as 1881. The use of half-
tone blocks to reproduce photographs dates from 1877, when they were
invented in Vienna: in the i88o’s they began to be extensively used in
newspapers. By 1900 they were common throughout the world. The
principles of reproducing illustrations in colour had been established early
in the century, but it was not until 1870 that mass-production methods
came into general use.
It has been said with a great deal of truth that the essential feature of an
industrial revolution is the creation of tools to make tools. While this is
perhaps an over-simplification, there is no doubt that the machine-tool
industry is of the utmost importance and it is not surprising that there
were important developments in it during the last three decades of the
nineteenth century, when there was a great industrial expansion in most
parts of the world. In so extensive and complicated a field it is very diffi-
cult to generalise, but it is probably fair to say that comparatively few new
types of machines appeared. The main changes were in design, in con-
structional material, and in a marked tendency towards automatic
working. The latter was particularly apparent in the United States, where
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a rapidly expanding economy created a shortage of labour and there was
in consequence a strong incentive to turn to machinery. In Europe, where
new machinery threatened unemployment, the tendency was often exactly
the reverse. The fundamental importance of the machine-tool to industry
is not difficult to visualise when it is recalled that it was required to make
all the products for every branch of mechanical engineering: for the
making of railway locomotives, bicycles, typewriters, textile machinery,
printing presses, and many other types of machine to which we have
already referred.
Automation is commonly looked upon as essentially a feature of the
mid-twentieth century. It is therefore worth noting that in fact it was then
already a century or so old, for automatic lathes began to appear in the
United States soon after the Civil War of 1861-5. During and after the
war there was a great shortage of skilled labour, and automatic machinery
was in great demand in consequence. The new machines, which were
required in such vast numbers, had in many instances to be made with an
accuracy considerably greater than had previously been general in the
engineering industry. Special attention was given to accuracy, and precise
measuring equipment was designed. In this field Sir Joseph Whitworth
played a particularly notable part. Accuracy became of steadily increasing
importance as the principle of interchangeable parts for machines became
widely used.
One of the most important developments— namely, the introduction of
much harder steel than had previously been available— has already been
noted. This change dates roughly from 1868, when it was discovered that
steel containing vanadium and tungsten could cut at 60 feet per minute,
compared with 40 feet per minute for the best steel previously available.
In 1900 there came another great jump forward when Taylor and White’s
alloy steels increased cutting speeds to 120 feet per minute, that is to say
three times as great as had been possible only thirty years earlier. It was
then found that existing machinery was in many cases insufficiently accu-
rate and robust to be able to take advantage of these new cutting materials,
and in consequence considerable changes in design took place in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
A period inaugurated by Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), Charles
Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), Clerk Maxwell’s Electricity
.. and Magnetism (1873) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy (1872) was unlikely to be devoid of intellectual ferment. The men
who exerted the largest influence on social, political and religious thought
during the last three decades of the nineteenth century were Marx and
Darwin: but the nature of this influence was greatly affected by the
changing character of scientific and social thought in general, and by the
repercussions of scientific ideas upon social thought. It was also pro-
foundly affected by the rapidly changing condition of society and govern-
ment, a condition brought about by scientific inventions, industrial
expansion and new forms of social and political organisation. In no other
period is intellectual history more inseparable from economic and political
history — an inevitable consequence of the conquests of science in both
thought and action. Under the impact of Marxism and Darwinism on the
one hand, of unusually fast-moving social change on the other, adherents
of older political philosophies and social faiths had to modify their argu-
ments and outlooks. Utilitarianism, idealism and positivism continued
as operative schools of thought. But they survived within a new context
of philosophical and religious beliefs, amid a new ethos and new
material conditions: and this context coloured their whole develop-
ment.
Marx’s analysis of economic forces in Das Kapital was designed to be
the massive underpinning of the political doctrines which he and his col-
laborator, Friedrich Engels, had propounded since they issued the
Communist Manifesto in 1848. As the avowed ‘continuation’ of Marx’s
Critique of Political Economy (1859), Das Kapital presented detailed evi-
dence of the working of the laws of dialectical materialism. It expounded
the economic principles which, in his view, made proletarian revolution
inevitable. It was the most systematic attempt hitherto made to interpret
industrial civilisation in terms of economic principles and the dynamics of
social history. The first volume appeared in German in 1867: the later
volumes were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894. When the first
volume appeared in English translation in 1886 it attracted little attention.
Marxism, as a political theory, was disseminated mainly by the journal-
istic and polemical activities of Engels and other disciples, especially in
France and Germany. Variants of the doctrines, usually denounced as
heresies or deviations by Engels, as later by Lenin, had, by the end of the
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century, moulded the development of social democratic parties and party
programmes in most European states.
Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex was in
effect, as its title implies, two books. Its first seven chapters were a sequel
to his The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (published, like
Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, in 1 859). The Origin had demolished
the notion of distinct and separately created species of plants and animals,
and had presented impressive evidence for the ultimate unity and com-
mon origin of all living things. Darwin now marshalled the evidence he
had accumulated for holding that man, like all other living creatures, had
evolved by natural selection from earlier and simpler forms of life. It was
this conclusion, merely hinted at in the Origin, that had touched off much
of the popular furore about Darwinism in the 1860’s. This did not save
his more explicit argument from renewed attack and abuse, though it now
won readier acceptance among scientists and intellectuals. The other
fourteen chapters of the book introduced a certain modification of his
original thesis that natural selection, operating through the process of
struggle for survival, explained the existence of diverse species. They
explored sexual selection as a factor in the evolution of species : a distinct
issue, as he emphasised, for whereas natural selection involved success of
both sexes in surviving the hazards of life, sexual selection involved the
success of certain individuals over others of the same species and even the
same sex. Darwin’s book, taken together with his earlier masterpiece,
constituted, as T. H. Huxley claimed, a ‘connected survey of the pheno-
mena of life permeated and vivified by a central idea
Much of the remarkable ferment of ideas in the next thirty years in
philosophy, theology, and social and political theory, derived from the
double yeast of Marxism and Darwinism. The ferment was kept stirred
less by the two originators of the theories, for Darwin died in 1882 and
Marx in 1883, than by their leading apostles, T. H. Huxley and Friedrich
Engels, both of whom lived until 1895. Huxley, more combative than
Darwin, had defended his hero since the memorable meeting of the
British Association at Oxford in 1 860. Thirty years later he was conducting
a scarcely less lively controversy with Mr Gladstone about the credibility
of the miracle of the Gadarene swine. The very word ‘agnostic’ was a
product of these great battles, in the course of which Huxley made evolu-
tionary concepts part of the whole texture of men’s outlook on life. If
Huxley was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Engels was Marx’s. In 1878 Engels pro-
duced, in his Anti-Diihring : Herr Eugen Diihring' s Revolution in Science, a
more complete exposition of Marxist political theory than anything
written by Marx himself. An intensely polemical book, attacking the
claim of Diihring that politics were more fundamental than economics, it
developed into an exposition of the meaning of Marxism for socialist
political theory. Though Engels further applied Marxist doctrines to social
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thought in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
and The Peasant Question in France and Germany (1894), the Anti-
Diihring remained his most powerful work. Eduard Bernstein avowed it
had ‘converted’ him to Marxism on a first reading.
The philosophical consequences of both Marxism and Darwinism were
all the greater because of the affinities between them. Marx and Engels
were insistent that their thought flowed in the same direction as Darwin’s,
and shared its scientific qualities. Marx claimed to be viewing the evolution
of society ‘as a process of natural history’. He wished to dedicate the first
volume of Das Kapital to Darwin, though Darwin with characteristic
caution declined the honour: and Engels, in his funeral speech at Marx’s
graveside, asserted that, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of develop-
ment of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of
human history’. Certainly each thinker had sought and found, beneath a
patiently collated mass of detailed fact and observation, great interpreta-
tive ideas — unifying and fundamental ideas which illuminated and con-
nected together hitherto disparate facts. Each had found a simple
principle of movement and development, a key to the better understanding
of change in the whole history of mankind. Each hypothesis was revolu-
tionary, in the sense that it conflicted violently with accepted notions
about the nature of man and of human life, and necessitated a rethinking
of much that previously had been taken as self-evident. Each theory
found the key to change in conflict — in the struggle for existence and in
the class war. Each was fundamentalist, in that it explained history in
terms of one great single principle, as intelligible as the law of gravitation,
and equally capable of being applied plausibly (if often with distortion or
by mere analogy) to other fields of thought. Such theories at any time
would be disruptive : in combination they were revolutionary.
Two further circumstances, in addition to their coincidence in time,
conspired to make Darwinism and Marxism especially potent as intel-
lectual influences. One was the simultaneous advance of scientific thought
as a whole ; the other was the new political structure of Western civilisation
as a whole.
The sciences of chemistry, mechanics and physics had already reached,
at this time, a stage of fresh generalisation and integration. The chemical
elements were found to fit into a systematic mathematical sequence
according to their atomic weights; and in 1871 Dimitri Mendeleef pro-
duced his Periodic Table which facilitated the discovery of new elements
(gallium in 1871, scandium in 1879, germanium in 1886, helium in 1895).
James Joule had established equivalence between heat and the chemical
energy or work expended in producing it, and Hermann Helmholtz had
extended the principle to the whole realm of nature as the First Law of
Thermodynamics, the principle of the conservation of energy. To this
Lord Kelvin had added the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the uni-
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versal conversion of useful energy into dissipated heat. In his Electricity
and Magnetism (1873) Clerk Maxwell fitted his discoveries in these fields
into the new pattern of mechanics and thermodynamics, putting forward
the thesis that electricity is matter moving in waves like those of light and
radiant heat, and that therefore all energy might be ultimately electro-
magnetic energy.
The parallelism between the new physics and the new biology was im-
pressive. Just as physics began with the idea of solid billiard-ball atoms of
fixed weight and moved towards a molecular theory linking matter with
energy, so biology began with the idea of distinct species and moved
towards an evolutionary theory of the interrelation of species. In com-
parable manner, Marx proposed to replace the rigid economic Taws’ of
the classical economists by an all-embracing theory of dialectical material-
ism, explaining not only economic change, but also politics and culture,
by a class theory of society. The discovery of great fundamental principles,
unifying various sectors of knowledge and thought into new patterns, was
very much in vogue. Marxism, attempting also to explain change, move-
ment and development, had the advantage of seeming to conform with
this vogue: it enjoyed the cachet of a scientific hypothesis.
The particular impact of Darwinism and Marxism upon social and
political thought must also be assessed in relation to the new political
structure of Western civilisation in the 1870’s. The outcome of the 1860’s
was a recasting of the political map : new frontiers were fixed, new states
created or old ones reconstituted, new systems of government consoli-
dated. The preservation of the American Union by northern victory in the
Civil War, the foundation of a united Canada by the British North
America Act of 1867 and its full operation by 1873, the preservation of the
Habsburg domains in Austria-Hungary by the improvisation of the Dual
Monarchy, the political unification of the Italian Kingdom and of the
German Reich, the frustration of the Irish independence movements and
the suppression of the Paris Commune in France, even the assertion of
papal ecclesiastical power that culminated in the Vatican Council of 1870:
all these events involved the confirmation or the creation of stronger and
more centralised authority. The state of the later nineteenth century was
to be a bigger, more stable, more active organ of government and admini-
stration than the state of earlier generations. Political thinkers were com-
pelled, by facts and conditions as well as by the challenge of new theories,
to ponder the ultimate nature of state power and authority, the grounds of
political obligation, the new pre-requisites of successful revolutionary
action.
Moreover, these new states existed as a result of prolonged conflicts and
decisive wars. The American Civil War, the successive wars of Bismarck
against Denmark, Austria-Hungary and France, the long fight for Italian
unity, the Civil War in France of which Marx wrote so effectively, sug-
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gested that violence was a natural accompaniment of modern state-
making. The new Europe of the i87o’s could be depicted either as the
latest manifestation of a Darwinian struggle for survival or, alternatively,
as the prelude to a new phase of historic class warfare implicit in the
materialist dialectic. Marx, indeed, interpreted the Paris Commune as the
beginning of the coming proletarian revolution. Either way, power, con-
flict and violence were the very stuff of politics. Events communicated
something of their brutality and violence to political and social thought.
The keynote of conflict was what first struck the writers who applied
Darwinism to political and social theory, and who have been subsequently
classed together as ‘social Darwinists’. In Britain and the United States
Herbert Spencer, already prolific in sociological theorising, became the
chief transmitter of ‘social Darwinism’. His volumes of Synthetic
Philosophy appeared during the i86o’s. His influential The Study of
Sociology first appeared in 1872-3, in serial form in the American Popular
Science Monthly and in the British Contemporary Review. Philosophically
tinged with determinism and politically with laissez-faire individualism, he
argued: ‘There cannot be more good done than that of letting social
progress go on unhindered; yet an immensity of mischief may be done in
the way of disturbing, and distorting and repressing, by policies carried
out in pursuit of erroneous conceptions.’ He pleaded that social and
political science must recognise and adopt the ‘general truths’ of biology,
and must not work against the principle of natural selection by ‘the
artificial preservation of those least able to take care of themselves’.
Such a view was warmly welcomed by conservatives everywhere. Its
French counterpart was the welcome given to Alfred Espinas’s Des
societes animates (1877). It was welcomed most ardently by conservatives
in America after the Civil War, who found in it justification both for
laissez-faire competition and for their faith in progress. Andrew Carnegie
later described the Tight that came as in a flood’ when he read Darwin
and Spencer: ‘Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural,
but I had found the truth of evolution. “All is well since all grows better”
became my motto, my true source of comfort.’ 1 It was not surprising that
one of the founders of sociological studies in America, William Graham
Sumner of Yale, wrote in these years: ‘The millionaires are a product of
natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out the require-
ment of certain work to be done.. . .They get high wages and live in
luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.’ 2 So could Darwinism
buttress complacent pragmatism. As D. G. Ritchie, an English idealist
critic of this attitude, pointed out: ‘Natural selection implies no further
morality than “Nothing succeeds like success”.’ 3
1 Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston, 1920), p. 327.
8 W. G. Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays (New Haven, 1913), p. 90.
3 D. G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics (London and New York, 1895), p. 13.
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That Darwinism was, in important respects, a refutation of Malthus’
basic distinction between men (who multiplied in geometrical ratio) and
animals or plants (which increased only in arithmetical progression) was
a fact noted only by the Marxists. They welcomed Darwinism as anti-
Malthusian, as disproving that poverty was inherent in the nature of life,
inferring it was inherent only in capitalist society. ‘It is remarkable’,
wrote Marx, ‘ that Darwin recognises among brutes and plants his English
society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new
markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence”.’ 1
Beyond the widespread mediation of Spencer, however, the precise
significance of Darwinism in political philosophy is complex and difficult
to assess. Even Spencer clung to mechanistic ideas (as suggested by his
Social Statics of 1864 or his The Man versus the State of 1881), and was
liable to use organic ideas as mere crude analogies. The many other
thinkers conventionally grouped into the somewhat misleading category
of ‘social Darwinists’ drew diverse and often contradictory inferences
from their applications of biology to society. The sciences of anthropology
and geology influenced their outlook as much as the new biology. Men
found in Darwinism, even when they understood it accurately, what they
wanted to find: and notions of laws of historical development were in-
herited from pre-Darwinian thinkers such as Hegel or Comte. Darwinian
ideas were often used to reinforce or merely to adorn arguments sub-
stantially derived from quite other sources.
The English liberal Walter Bagehot and the Austrian sociologist Ludwig
Gumplowicz perceived the subtler implications of the new biology and
blended with it the new anthropology of E. B. Tylor, L. H. Morgan and
W. Wundt. Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1872) was a collection of six
provocative essays, as pithy as Spencer’s works were prolix. Its theme was
described in its sub-title: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of
‘ Natural Selection ’ and ‘ Inheritance ’ to Political Society. His thesis was
that whereas political organisations had formerly served to create a ‘cake
of custom’, to hold society together and enable it to survive in the struggle
for existence, progress in more modern conditions required that the cake
of custom be broken. Flexibility comes above all from intellectual free-
dom, encouraged by ‘the age of discussion’ which ‘gives a premium to
intelligence’, and breeds that quality of ‘animated moderation’ essential
to the good conduct of modern government. He thus shifted the emphasis
from conservatism to liberalism. Gumplowicz was more deterministic.
He held that the state, and indeed all political institutions, originated in
conflicts between social groups and the eventual triumph of one group
over others. Material, social and even intellectual progress came from the
1 Marx’s letter to Engels, 18 June 1862, quoted in R. L. Meek, Marx and Engels on
Malthus (London, 1953), p. 173. See also F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1872-82),
quoted ibid. pp. 185-8.
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fact that it was the fittest group that triumphed : and such progress came
‘merely through social action and reaction, entirely independent of the
initiative and will of individuals, contrary to their ideas and wishes and
social striving’. This view of group struggles came close at times to
Marxism, though it drew no inspiration from Marxism itself.
In his insistence that the state is ‘ the organised control of the minority
over the majority’ Gumplowicz also approached the viewpoint of the
Machtpolitik school of German thinkers, of whom the most coherent and
influential was Heinrich von Treitschke. But Treitschke emphasised the
creative will of great leaders in the making of states. He stood in the
direct pedigree of Hegelian philosophy, reinforced by the experience of
state-making in the 1860’s; and indeed, as he himself avowed, in the still
older lineage of Machiavelli.
The American sociologist Lester Ward, associated both personally and
in philosophical outlook with Gumplowicz, drew from Darwinism infer-
ences directly contrary to Spencer’s. He attacked laissez-faire doctrines in
favour of social planning. He denied that the truths of biology could be
simply transferred to the social sciences, that Nature’s ways must be
man’s. ‘The fundamental principle of biology’, he wrote in 1893, ‘is
natural selection, that of sociology is artificial selection. The survival of
the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which implies and would
better be called the destruction of the weak. If nature progresses through
the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the
weak.’ Ward accepted Gumplowicz’s ideas of group struggles as applicable
to race conflicts in the future, but held that in advanced societies rational
policy would replace the violence and brutality of the past : a point made
by T. H. Huxley in his Romanes Lecture of the same year on Evolution
and Ethics . 1
Later racial theorists seized eagerly upon Darwinian ideas, and racial-
ism in these years usually went hand in hand with imperialism. The
loudest advocate of American racialism and imperialism, the Rev. Josiah
Strong, produced in 1885 his immensely popular book, Our Country: Its
Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. He triumphantly quoted Darwin’s
own view, in The Descent of Man , that ‘There is apparently much truth in
the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the
character of the people, are the results of natural selection; the more
energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe having
emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country,
and having there succeeded best’. 2 Strong saw the next stage of world
history as a great struggle for Lebensraum, ‘ the final competition of races
1 T. H. Huxley and J. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893-1943 (London, 1947), p. 81 :
‘Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution
for it of another, which may be called the ethical process.’
2 C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 1, p. 179.
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for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled’. The Englishman who
became a German, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, published in 1899 a
book which was to have great popularity in Germany before 1914 and
exerted some influence upon Hitler: Grundlagen des Neunzehnteti Jahr-
hunderts ( The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century). Drawing heavily on
all the writings of Darwin, as of other biologists and anthropologists, he
argued that ’crossing obliterates character’, that racial purity is a pre-
requisite of progress, that the Germanic peoples must strive for purity and
predominance in the world.
Yet racial theory in no way originated either with Darwin, who regarded
racial differences as of minor significance, or even with biology in general.
It had, as its pioneer exponent, the Frenchman Count Arthur de
Gobineau, in 1853; it had its roots deep in traditional prejudices, in the
growing contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans throughout the
century, in the bias of the school of * Teutonic’ history that included E. A.
Freeman and Charles Kingsley ; it found highly unscientific expression in
such anti-semitic bigots as Edouard Drumont in France, Adolf Stocker
in Germany and Karl Lueger in Vienna; it was reinforced by pseudo-
scientific sociologists like Gustave Le Bon in France or Nicholas Dani-
levsky in Russia. Here, as in other spheres of argument, Darwinism was
pressed into service and wildly distorted in the process. Much so-called
‘social Darwinism’ is mere lip-service or polemical camouflage, not
genuine intellectual influence.
To complete the gamut of different uses to which Darwinism was put,
mention must be made of two political theories at the opposite pole to
racialism and imperialism: English Fabianism and Russian philosophical
anarchism. The Fabians of the 1 88o’s took their economic ideas more from
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) than from Marx: but they
found in Darwinian theory justification for belief in the ‘inevitability of
gradualness’. If an accumulatibn of minute physical changes could result
in the immense variety of living things, surely social transformation, too,
could be brought about by a sequence of gradual reforms rather than by
violent revolution. This idea lay at the root of evolutionary socialism as
it was understood in England. The society’s secretary and historian,
Edward Pease, rated Darwinism high among the formative intellectual
influences on the younger generation in the 1880’s. ‘Our parents, who
read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore
no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual
moorings of our upbringings. . .we had to discover somewhere for our-
selves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science
of sociology.’ 1 Sidney Webb, in Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889),
argued that ‘conscious “direct adaptation” steadily supplants the un-
conscious and wasteful “indirect adaptation” of the earlier form of the
1 E. R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (London, 1916), rev. ed. 1925, p. iS.
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struggle for existence’, and that in current conditions of civilisation ‘the
units selected from are not individuals, but societies’. 1 In Fabian hands
evolutionary Darwinism became an antidote to revolutionary Marxism.
Prince Petr Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid (1902), also drew upon zoology to
argue that social co-operation and helpfulness were instincts as strong as
those of combat and struggle He could correctly claim that Darwin had
emphasised the evolutionary importance of man’s moral sense, and had
not regarded conflict between men as in itself a healthy evolutionary force.
But his views had more in common with the ‘mutualism’ of Pierre- Joseph
Proudhon than with any other theories.
Must, then, the conclusion be that the influence of Darwinism (and of
biology as a whole) on social and political theory was so diverse and
diffuse as to be almost without meaning? Its direct and specific influence
has often been exaggerated. Its role was, rather, in conjunction with the
advance of scientific knowledge and thought in other fields, especially in
the physical sciences and in anthropology, to undermine older political
assumptions and beliefs, to open the door to more daring speculation and
fundamental rethinking of social and political ideas, and to widen further
the gulf already separating political philosophy from theology, meta-
physics and ethics. Because of the ease with which Darwinian ideas could
be transferred to social thought, they reinforced that tendency to seek
precise social data and verifiable social ‘laws’ to which positivist philo-
sophy had given rise: the new biology gave new life to the principles of
positivism, just as in some respects it lent support to the advance of
Marxism. But its most effective permeation of philosophy came more
silently in the twentieth century, through a philosopher such as Henri
Bergson, after the thunder of Huxley’s battles had ceased.
Meanwhile Marxism, following a roughly parallel course, was also
penetrating men’s minds and habits of thought. In nearly every European
country it won adherents who publicised and propagated its doctrines and
formed political parties. After the founding in 1889 of the Second Inter-
national, these national parties enjoyed a common forum for debate
about principles and policies. But since working-class movements and
socialist parties in most countries had strong pre-Marxist roots, much of
the debate was concerned with theoretical relationships between orthodox
revolutionary Marxism and reformist socialism : or with practical working
relationships between trade-union organisations and working-class move-
ments on one hand, and the small but missionising groups of militant
Marxists on the other. The result was a rich profusion of differing schools
of socialist thought : for Marx and Engels, like Darwin and Huxley, found
that the Devil can quote scriptures for his own purpose. Marxist ortho-
doxy found itself engaged in an almost Darwinian struggle for existence.
By 1900 it was still far from having found any basis for peaceful
1 Fabian Essays in Socialism (London, 1889), 1920 ed., pp. 57-8.
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co-existence with the beliefs of ‘evolutionary socialism’, so persuasively
stated by men like Eduard Bernstein in Germany or Jean Jaures in
France.
In several countries specifically Marxist parties were founded in the late
i 8.70 ’s or 1880’s: the ‘Parti ouvrier frangais’ of Jules Guesde in 1879, the
‘Parti socialiste beige’ in the same year; in Britain Henry Hyndman’s
‘Democratic Federation’ of 1881 became, two years later, the ‘Social
Democratic Federation’; the ‘Liberation of Labour Group’, formed in
Switzerland in 1883 by Plekhanov and Axelrod, was destined for a great
historic role as the germ of the future Bolshevik party of Russia. Such
parties were founded, however, against a background of prolonged efforts
and wrangles in the 1860’s and 1870’s, connected with the unsuccessful
efforts of Marx and Engels to capture the socialist movement in Germany
from Ferdinand Lassalle and his disciples, and with the abortive First
International of 1864-76. The most important outcome had been the
formation of the German Social Democratic party on the basis of the
Gotha Programme of 1875. Marx criticised the programme sharply and
his critique, subsequently published by Engels in 1891, had considerable
influence on Marxist thought. But the even balance between orthodox
Marxism and the doctrines of state socialism advanced by Lassalle during
the 1860’s made the Gotha Programme an admirable basis for the party
in Germany. Postulating that ‘labour is the source of all wealth and all
culture’, it demanded ‘the promotion of the instruments of labour to the
common property of society and the co-operative control of all labour,
with application of the product of labour to the common good and its just
distribution’. It then demanded the usual democratic rights: a free state,
universal suffrage with secret and obligatory voting, a ‘people’s army in
place of the standing armies ’, abolition of ‘all laws which restrict freedom
of thought and inquiry’, free justice and universal, free, compulsory
public education. It also sought social welfare legislation, right of free
association, and a single progressive income tax in place of indirect taxes.
Marx attacked the programme phrase by phrase, showing each to be
vague, or confused and inconsistent, or based on a failure to understand
the materialist dialectic. The gist of his attack was to restate the Marxist
dogma: ‘Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the
revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds
to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing
but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.' Engels, in a letter of
the same time to August Bebel, stated Marxist political doctrine even
more explicitly : ‘As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution
which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s
adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people’s state: so
long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests
of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it
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becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.’ 1
These basically different conceptions of the state underlay the feuds of the
Marxists not merely with the followers of Lassalle, but also with reformist
socialists of all kinds.
In its Erfurt Programme of 1891 the German Social Democratic party
adopted the doctrines of Marx: in particular, the theory of the growing
gulf between monopolistic capitalism and the impoverished proletariat,
and the need to socialise the main means of production. But it preserved
enough Lassallian faith in the power of the state to add : ‘ The struggle of
the working class against capitalistic exploitation is of necessity a political
struggle. The working class cannot conduct its economic struggle, and
cannot develop its economic organisation, without political rights. It
cannot effect the change of the means of production into the possession of
the collective society without coming into possession of political power.’
This view naturally came to prevail among the growing Social Democratic
parties of Europe, seeking power by parliamentary procedures and
making themselves the spokesmen of organised labour. Certain political
issues flowed from this position — whether socialists should enter into
coalitions with liberal parties, at what point they should resist the claims
of the nation state in order to uphold those of the workers who ‘knew no
country’, what form of national army they could logically support. These
issues haunted the congresses of the Second International and put French
socialists at loggerheads with German.
The success of Social Democrats in winning votes, and in establishing
contacts with trade unions whose central aim was to promote the immedi-
ate material interests of their members, fostered the view that a socialist
society might, after all, be built by gradual reforms and constitutional
procedures, without the apocalyptic moment of proletarian revolution
foretold by Marx. The French Possibilists led by Paul Brousse, the
British Labour party, the followers of Eduard Bernstein in Germany, of
Victor Adler in Austria, of Filippo Turati in Italy, all moved in this
direction. Wherever the electoral franchise was wide enough and parlia-
mentary institutions strong enough to offer socialism a constitutional path
to power, extremist Marxism faltered and lost ground. The eloquence of
Jean Jaures appealed to a creed of liberal socialism that was taking shape
throughout most of Europe. Until 1914 a convenient distinction between
maximum and minimum programmes preserved unity of purpose on
paper. The maximum programmes were couched in thorough-going
Marxist terms, the minimum were lists of political and social reforms
constitutionally attainable within the existing structure of capitalist
society. Only in Russia, where even the minimum demands were in sub-
stance revolutionary, did Marxist theory as expounded by Lenin dominate
the aims of social democracy.
1 Marx and Engels, Selected Works (London, 1950, 2 vols.), vol. 11, p. 39.
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The practical achievement of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe
was surprisingly small. It won converts in every country, and its inter-
national appeal brought socialists from many countries together within
the framework of the Second International. It brought a new intellectual
rigour and greater depth into socialist thought: but it also brought a
dogmatic harshness and greater quarrelsomeness. Men debated the
niceties of socialist doctrine and the subtleties of political tactics with
scholastic fervour. Shattered by its own internal divisions and by the
cataclysm of the First World War, socialism had to be entirely recon-
structed after 1918, by which time Marxism as reinterpreted by Lenin had
won its first victory — in Russia.
Before 1900 the consequences of Marxism for philosophy and for social
thought had not become fully apparent: yet already Marx’s ideas had
seeped into men’s minds and transformed into overtones the old material-
istic undertones of nineteenth-century thought. Economics, in particular,
could not be the same after Marx, any more than could biology after
Darwin. Many who rejected its materialist determinism absorbed some-
thing of its materialism, and were compelled to modify their outlook in
fundamental ways. The greater attention already beginning to be paid to
economic history owed nothing to Marxism, though the rapid progress of
the study of economic history in the twentieth century probably did. The
new schools of economic theory, the exponents of marginal utility in
Britain or the Kathedersozialisten (‘Socialists of the Chair’) in Germany,
owed more to Marx’s opponents than to Marx. The party of August Bebel
and Wilhelm Liebknecht could even assert, in its Eisenach programme of
1869, that ‘the social is inseparable from the political question; its solu-
tion depends on this, and is possible only in the democratic state’. But for
all economists, as for all political socialists, Marxist ideology became, by
its very rigidity, an external term of reference, a form of the absolute by
which shades of materialism and of determinism could be measured. In
this respect it clarified thought, even if its immediate impact was so much
confusion — a respect in which it resembled Darwinism. So it appeared,
at least, to a boy in Kazan reading the first volume of Das Kapital. Lenin
compared Marxism to ‘a solid block of steel, from which you cannot
eliminate even one basic assumption without falling into the arms of a
bourgeois-reactionary falsehood’.
Already, however, Marxism was having to fight on two fronts : not only
against right-wing socialists sharing the tenets of Bernstein, as expounded
in his Evolutionary Socialism (1898), but also against a revolutionary
syndicalism of the left, evolved in practice by the French trade unions and
in theory by Georges Sorel. Sorel adhered to Marx’s doctrines of the
inevitability of class war and the need for proletarian revolution to bring
a classless society. He did not cling to the full gospel of dialectical
materialism. He argued for direct action through the natural proletarian
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formations, the trade unions ; for the leadership of an ‘ audacious minority ’
planning every strike as a skirmish in the class war and realising the need
to use violence to destroy the bourgeois state ; for direct action inspired by
a ‘myth’ of proletarian victory through the general strike. Although his
main writings and influence belong to the twentieth century he had already,
in 1898, formulated some of his basic contentions in U Avenir socialist e
des syndicats. Sorel has been called a 4 prismatic thinker’, in the sense that
many beams of intellectual light focus upon him, and radiate from him.
If he derived his social and economic insights mainly from Marx, he
derived his psychological insights from Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is the only other figure of these decades to rank in stature
with Darwin and Marx. The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, appeared in
1872; he died in 1900. From 1878, until he went insane in 1888, he
produced one book each year. His intense, brooding, introspective genius
conceived a philosophy of life and death that defied all existing and con-
ventional doctrines. He was probably the most original genius among
even the three giants mentioned. Nietzsche perceived psychological
truths such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and Carl Jung were to
proclaim after his death : yet neither Bergson nor Freud seems consciously
to have owed him any intellectual debt. Georges Sorel was probably the
first important heir of his thought. Study of Sorel reveals unexpectedly
numerous points of contact between Marx and Nietzsche: like them he is
convinced of the decadence of bourgeois society, he believes in violence as
the only cure for its evils, he glorifies war, he despises liberal democracy.
He blends the two moralities of Marx (proletarian and bourgeois) with
the two moralities (master and slave) of Nietzsche. 1 Sorel’s intellectual
pilgrimage from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism marks the triumph
in his philosophy of Nietzschean ingredients over Marxian.
The whole nexus of tendencies of thought that emanated from Darwin,
Marx and Nietzsche can be presented as one single attack upon the philo-
sophy of idealism : for though Nietzsche asserted so violently the import-
ance of human will in opposition to the determinism found in Darwin and
Marx, it was not the will of rational intelligence, that expression of pure
Idea or Mind described by Hegel and his disciples. That idealist thinkers
felt to be fundamental this challenge to their view of the world as a partial
yet progressive realisation of absolute ideas and values, was expressed by
Benedetto Croce, in a brief essay on ‘Contrasting political ideals after
1870’: ‘Foremost is the doctrine of the struggle for existence and of the
survival of the fittest, which inspires the political ideology of both com-
munism (with its class struggle and dictatorship of the class powerful in
number and expert in the material production of the means of subsistence)
and imperialism or nationalism, which transfers the same struggle from
social classes to people and states. This doctrine is found in a heroic and
1 See E. H. Carr, Studies in Revolution (London, 1950), pp. 154-7.
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aristocratic form in that kind of troubled religion named after Nietzsche,
a poet with an anguished heart. Its weakness is revealed in its bitter clash
with the moral conscience, to which it is utterly abhorrent.’ 1 The clash
between the new ideas and the old appears more absolute in retrospect
than it seemed at the time: and other schools of political thought, by
partial assimilation and adaptation of the new ideas in the ways described,
contrived to soften — or at least to postpone — the ‘ bitter clash with the
moral conscience ’.
The political theory of an age includes not only the novelties, but also
the extensions, elaborations and modifications of older and more familiar
schools of thought. The philosophies of utilitarianism, idealism and
positivism developed during these years in a curious semi-insulation
from the new ferment of Darwinism and Marxism, and still more of
Nietzschean thought. It remains to describe briefly the main lines of these
developments.
John Stuart Mill, in the Autobiography published in the year of his death
(1873), gave classical expression to the development and dilemmas of
utilitarianism at that date. It includes no mention of either Darwin or
Marx. But it reveals how the honest pursuit of truth and a sensitive social
conscience led a thinker, steeped in Benthamite orthodoxy, to accept a
much greater measure of state activity. ‘The social problem of the future
we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action,
with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal
participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.’ 2 Mill’s radicalism
flowed into Gladstonian liberalism. So also did the liberal idealism of the
man who did most to revive idealist philosophy in England, Thomas Hill
Green. Indeed Mill’s Autobiography, it has been said, ‘explains better
than any other record why Benthamism failed to satisfy the England of the
later nineteenth century, and why, after 1870, T. H. Green took the place
of Mill as the most influential writer on matters of social philosophy’. 3
But the traditions of individualistic utilitarian thought lived on. They sur-
vived in lawyers like A. V. Dicey, whose Lectures on the Relation between
Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (1905)
traced specifically ‘the debt of collectivism to Benthamism’; 4 in Sir J. F.
Stephen, whose Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) attacked Mill’s essay
On Liberty from the standpoint of older radicalism; in the philosopher
Henry Sidgwick, whose The Elements of Politics (1891) avowedly ‘derived
1 B. Croce, Politics and Morals (London, 1946), pp. 91-2.
2 J. S. Mill, Autobiography (London, 1873), 1924 ed., p. 196.
8 H. J. Laski, Introduction to Autobiography of J. S. Mill (Oxford, 1924), p. x.
* Of Dicey’s earlier and even more magisterial work. Introduction to the Study of the Law
of the Constitution (1885) it has been claimed by its modem editor, E. C. S. Wade, that ‘to
the historian who seeks to appreciate the outlook of a notable adherent of the Whig school
of political thought in the later years of Queen Victoria, the merit of the work needs no
recommendation’ ( ibid . 9th ed., 1939, p. xiv).
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from the writings of Bentham and J. S. Mill’, and paid little or no heed to
either Darwin of Marx. Bentham’s doctrine, that the purpose of legisla-
tion should be to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
was separable from laissez-faire assumptions, and could be used, as Mill
and Sidgwick showed, to justify considerable state activity.
For this reason the moderate Hegelianism of Green could find much
common ground, in practical politics, with latter-day utilitarianism.
Green delivered in Oxford his famous Lectures on the Principles of
Political Obligation in the winter of 1879-80, three years after his colleague,
F. H. Bradley, had published his Ethical Studies. In Green the impress of
Kant is greater, that of Hegel less, than in Bradley. But together they
founded the Oxford school of idealist thinkers which included Bernard
Bosanquet, J. H. Muirhead and D. G. Ritchie (whose Darwinism and
Politics of 1889, and Darwin and Hegel of 1893, brought together the
streams of idealist and biological thought). Green’s non-utilitarian re-
statement of the meaning of individual freedom, and his formulation of
the ‘common good’ in ethical and spiritual, rather than materialist, terms,
provided a more satisfying political theory of liberal reforms in these years
than did Benthamite doctrines.
In other countries too, notably in Germany and Italy, idealist philo-
sophy enjoyed a revival. In Germany, indeed, it survived rather than
revived, for the cult of Kant and Hegel had never died and positivism had
never gained as great a hold as in France or even Italy. Under the shadow
of the great Leopold von Ranke (who died in 1886 after six decades of
active historiography), German thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich
Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch strove to make a coherent philosophy out
of the study of history on one hand, and the methods and advances of the
natural sciences on the other. For this immense labour the structure of
Hegelian thought was convenient, and was compounded with Kantian
philosophy. Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883)
rested on a distinction between the world of nature studied by the natural
sciences, and the world of human activity (history, society, culture), to be
studied equally scientifically but by scientific methods basically different
from those of natural science. In this sense, he and his colleagues launched
a counter-attack against positivism, as against any mere assimilation of
man to animals, society to nature. Knowledge in the field of social and
cultural science must come through some kind of internal process,
through living experience and understanding. In some respects they
paved the way for the political ideas of Freudian psychology and the
so-called ‘irrationalists’. The fruit of their thought was the sociology of
Max Weber, with its ingenious attempt to unravel the historical interplay
of religion and economics, the spiritual and the material. Weber’s famous
study of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (. Die protestant-
ische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus ) first appeared as articles in
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
1904-5. It became one of the great pioneer works of social thought in
the twentieth century. ‘Alone of his contemporaries’, it has been
claimed, ‘Weber was able to bridge the chasm between positivism and
idealism.’ 1
In Italy, according to Croce, ‘ Marxian Socialism came to fill the void
created in Italian thought and ideals ’. It blended with positivism on one
hand, with idealism on the other, leaving orthodox Marxism a curiously
impoverished movement. Vilfredo Pareto, positivist in the foundations of
his thought, widened Marx’s concept of class conflicts into a more com-
plex theory of group conflicts: his Les Sys femes socialist es (1902) became
a classic refutation of Marxian sociology as well as of Marxian economics.
Croce himself passed through his curious ‘parenthesis’ of intensive
Marxist study between 1895 and 1899, when he imbibed the doctrines
from the only important Italian theorist of Marxism, Antonio Labriola.
Then he reverted to his basically idealist philosophy of history and
aesthetics. Croce used the materialist interpretation of history as an
intellectual whetstone, a means of sharpening his already evolving theory
of history and historiography. He made use of Marxism as a stick to beat
the positivists and as a corrective to his idealist ideas: then he uncere-
moniously discarded it. It is to Italian philosophy in these years that we
must look to find the clearest interactions of Marxism with both posi-
tivism and idealism.
Positivism prevailed even more in France than in Italy. But French
positivism, affected partly by the new biology but even more by the anti-
clericalism of French intellectuals, no longer shared the optimism of its
earlier radical, utilitarian stages. It had become a harsher, more im-
personal and fatalistic creed. Ernest Renan, indeed, continued to voice
an urbane, balanced scientific outlook, and strove to base political thought,
like ethics, on a calm and reasoned view of life. His little study of La
Re forme intellectuelle et morale (1871) was inspired by the turbulent
events of the time in France, and sought to find the permanent forces
underlying them. In 1890 he published a work originally written in 1849,
L' Avenir de la science, his fullest exposition of a positivist approach to
history and society. His sensitive, critical, undogmatic mind remained,
however, sceptical even of positivism. Although he had many readers he
attracted no disciples, and spoke for none but himself.
The leading exponent of French positivism, in direct lineage from
Comte, was Hippolyte Taine, an almost exact contemporary of Renan.
In Taine the characteristic dogmatic, mechanistic, even deterministic
features of positivism came to full fruition. ‘All human facts, moral as
well as physical, being bound up with causes and subject to laws, it
follows that all works of man, art, religion, philosophy, literature, moral,
political or social phenomena, are but the results of general causes that
1 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (London, 1959), p. 335.
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must be determined by scientific method.’ So he wrote in 1870: 1 and
proceeded to try to reveal these general causes at work in the course of
French history. By his rigorous standards of historical research he
fostered a more scientific study of historical sources : by its dogmatic con-
clusions and its intensely nationalistic interpretation, his great study of
Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1875-85) served as a conservative
(but equally nationalistic) antithesis to the influence which Jules Michelet
had wielded earlier in the century. French scholarship, through the
lexicographer Emile Littre, the literary critic Emile Faguet, the sociologist
Emile Durkheim, the social theorist Alfred Fouillee, remained permeated
by what might be called a residual positivism. Such thinkers accepted the
challenge of Marxism (like Durkheim) or of Darwinism (like Fouillee),
and strove to restate the problems of their time in terms of a positivist
philosophy adapted to these new ideas.
In England a group of popular rationalist writers based their outlook
on Comtian positivism transmitted in part through John Stuart Mill (who
in 1865 had written with reserve of Auguste Comte and Positivism, and
during the 1840’s had corresponded with Comte). Frederic Harrison,
John Morley, Leslie Stephen and a host of other contributors made
the Fortnightly Review a powerful organ of later Victorian liberalism.
As in France, however, English positivism was now a residual outlook,
greatly modified by less mechanistic and more idealistic components. In
America, the pragmatism of Charles Pierce and William James repre-
sented an extension of positivism in a different philosophical direction.
Christian thought, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, found itself
challenged by all the new ideas and conditions already mentioned. Whilst
churches were confronted with the drift away from religious observance
and faith, and with the secular power of the new nation states in Italy and
Germany, theology was challenged by the new science and by the cult of
‘modernism’ that sprang from textual criticism of the Bible. The period
brought a series of open conflicts between churches and states, such as the
battles about education between clericals and anti-clericals in France, the
Kulturkampf in Germany, and the feud between the Vatican and the new
Italian kingdom. This background of political and social conflicts exacer-
bated the theological controversies of fundamentalists and modernists. In
the realm of ideas, and more particularly of political and social thought,
two developments loomed large: a trend towards ‘good works’ in Pro-
testant thought, and a trend towards social Catholicism and Catholic
democracy.
In the Protestant world new religious movements appeared. The Salva-
tion Army was formed in England in 1878, and the Christian Science
movement grew up in America in the 1870’s. Protestant believers turned
their energies increasingly to humanitarian, educational, philanthropic
1 H. Taine, V Avenir de r intelligence (1870).
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and social reforms, and (as did Catholics) to overseas missions. To the
many already existing societies in Britain were now added a host of
temperance movements, boys’ brigades, societies for the protection of
children and animals, and movements to alleviate social distress. Pro-
testant theology tended to divide into two rival wings, those who re-
affirmed a fundamentalist interpretation of the scriptures, and those who
adopted a modernist approach, absorbing into theology the ideas of the
new science and adapting their creed to them.
The Roman Church passed through two successive phases. The first,
haunted by the loss of the papacy’s temporal power in 1870 and by the
outcome of the Vatican Council, was marked by intransigent resistance
both to liberalism and nationalism. The stormy pontificate of Pius IX
ended in 1878. The pope who had published the Syllabus Errorum in 1864
had included among the ideas to be condemned the view that ‘ the Roman
Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and reach agreement with
“progress”. Liberalism and recent departures in civil society’. His suc-
cessor, Leo XIII, issued a series of encyclicals defining more constructively
Roman Catholic doctrines of state and society: especially Immortale Dei
(1885), Libertas (1888) and Rerum Novarum (1891). By his revival and
extension of Thomism, with its capacity to reconcile faith with reason,
theology with science, he formulated the theological basis for the policy
of ralliement and of adaptation to new conditions which made possible the
rise of social Catholicism. The papacy continued to condemn materialism,
secularism and agnosticism: but it now accepted (on conditions) demo-
cracy and liberalism, with a view to infusing them with Christian doctrines
as against the secular ideas of militant nationalism and socialism. In Rerum
Novarum capitalist exploitation of labour as a commodity was condemned
as roundly as Marxist doctrines of class war. The state was accorded both
the right and the duty to encourage free associations of workers and to
undertake legislation against economic oppression and social distress.
With papal encouragement Catholic trade unions grew up in most
western European countries. They rivalled socialist and syndicalist move-
ments on their own grounds of working-class industrial organisation.
Compact, if often small, political parties based on social Catholic ideas
emerged to rival liberal and socialist parties. Thereby the Church accepted
existing regimes as a proper medium of political activity. From these
developments sprang much constructive social thinking. In France, on
ground already prepared by Montalembert and Lamennais, men like
Marc Sangnier in Le Sillon, Albert de Mun and Rene de la Tour du Pin
tried to make the ralliement proclaimed by Leo XIII a spiritual and
intellectual reality as well as a political force. After the accession of Pope
Pius X in 1903, relations between church and state again deteriorated,
especially in France. But theories and movements of Catholic democracy
survived, to bear fruit later in the twentieth century.
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In Germany, where social Catholic ideas had been earlier expounded by
Adolf Kolping and Bishop von Ketteler, a confessional Centre party was
founded in 1870. It emerged from the storms of the Kulturkampf in-
vigorated and popularly based, with a complete programme of construc-
tive social reforms. In Austria-Hungary Christian socialism found a
powerful advocate in Baron Karl von Vogelsang, whilst in Vienna the
formidable Karl Lueger denounced, in the name of Christianity, socialism
and capitalism, Marxists and Jews, with equal ferocity. Pan-German
nationalism in Austria, inspired especially by Georg von Schonerer, was
also violently anti-semitic: and significantly it was Austrian Jewry that
gave birth to the movement of Zionism. Theodor Herzl published his
Der Judenstaat ( The Jewish State ) in 1896, and in the following year he
founded the Zionist Congress. The conflict between religious and racial
forces seemed to be the key to Austrian politics : so it seemed, at least, to a
young down-and-out in the Vienna doss-houses of 1909. Adolf Hitler
later recorded, in Mein Kampf the deep impression left on him by the
ideas of Schonerer, Lueger and Herzl, and his growing conviction that
‘knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the
inner nature and therefore the real aims of Social Democracy’. Hitler,
like other racialists already mentioned, saw political conflicts in crudely
Darwinian terms. ‘The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is
only preserved because other living things perish through struggle In
this struggle, the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able, the
weak, lose.’ 1
The total outcome of the great ferment of ideas during the last genera-
tion of the nineteenth century was mixed in character and purport. But
here was the great seed-time of the twentieth century. Materialistic philo-
sophy, powerfully reinforced by Marxism and Darwinism, became more
pervasive and struck deeper roots in men’s minds. Utilitarianism and
positivism, so prevalent in Western political thought before 1870, were
affected by it. On the other hand idealist and Christian philosophy con-
trived to assimilate many scientific and sociological ideas without sur-
rendering to materialism. The greatest economist of the twentieth century,
John Maynard Keynes, found philosophical basis for his humanistic
liberalism in repudiation of both utilitarianism and Marxism. Writing of
his coterie at Cambridge at the turn of the century, he declared, ‘we were
amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our genera-
tion, to escape from the Benthamite tradition Moreover, it was this
escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism of our
philosophy, which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final
reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism.’ 2
1 Hitler’s speech at Kulmbach, 5 Februaiy 1928: quoted in A. Bullock, Hitler: A Study
in Tyranny (London, 1952), p. 31.
• J. M. Keynes, Two Memoirs (London, 1949), pp. 96-7.
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From the intellectual ferment itself, perhaps more than by any direct
derivation from political philosophers, sprang two new tendencies which
were to have immense subsequent importance. One was a realisation of
the non-rational, subconscious impulses behind the behaviour of men in
society: the other was belief in the efficacy of ‘direct action’, or organised
violence, as an agency of social and political change. It is somewhat
unreal to identify the former with the philosophy of Nietzsche, the latter
with the philosophy of Sorel; or to seek an explanation of these tendencies
in the discoveries of Sigmund Freud (whose The Interpretation of Dreams
appeared in 1899), in the pragmatism of William James, or in the peculiar
blend of positivism and anti-intellectualist racialism to be found in Charles
Maurras and the Action franqaise. The great future exploiters of irration-
alism and the practitioners of activism were, indeed, coming to maturity
in these years. Lenin was born in 1870, Stalin in 1879, Mussolini in 1883,
Hitler in 1889. But it is impossible to separate the intellectual climate of
the time from the violent and irrational movements of the time as forma-
tive influences upon their minds. The Spanish-American and South
African wars, the upheaval of the Dreyfus Affair in France and the
Russian revolution of 1905, the excitability of the popular press and of
international diplomacy, all provided a lurid background, implicitly chal-
lenging the validity of rationalism and hedonism in philosophy. A whole
new temper of thought and action — a new ethos — came to prevail by the
opening years of the twentieth century.
The herald of the new age, both in thought and action, was Lenin. His
pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902) may be read as both the epilogue to
political philosophy of the previous generation, and the prologue to
political action in the next. It contained the basic idea not only of
Bolshevism, but of all single-party dictatorships. He contended that
‘without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary move-
ment’; that ‘political activity has its logic quite apart from the conscious-
ness of those who, with the best intentions, call either for terror or for
lending the economic struggle itself a political character’; and that the
prerequisite of successful political action was ‘a small, compact core,
consisting of reliable, experienced and hardened workers, with responsible
agents in the principal districts and connected by all the rules of strict
secrecy with the organizations of revolutionaries’. When, after 1903, he
proceeded to forge such an organisation and led it to victory, politics
entered upon a new era.
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CHAPTER V
LITERATURE
T he literature of the late nineteenth century shows unmistakable
symptoms of decadence. What is decaying is a literary tradition
which dates back to the Renaissance, when its basic genres, its con-
ventions for representing the world and giving a valid picture of human
experience, were laid down anew. The tradition was largely founded on a
belief that the artistic imagination truly mirrors nature, and this belief
persisted through all later changes in theme and expression. The great dis-
tinction between realism and romanticism, which accounts for most of the
major variations in the literature of the earlier nineteenth century, still did
not break the tradition. It rather enriched it with a subtler sense of the
difference between the world as mirrored in poetry and the world as
mirrored in prose, and indicated a fuller awareness of the interesting role
played by specifically subjective adventures in thought and feeling. Confi-
dence in the power of art to reflect the true sense and shape of these richer
possibilities remained unshaken. Towards the end of the century, how-
ever, the reliability, indeed the responsibility, of the imagination in dis-
covering the way things ‘really’ are and in knowing what they mean
began to be seriously questioned. It seemed possible to write about
anything in almost any way, to enjoy literally almost any number of
views, but this gain in literary scope and freedom was accompanied by a
loss of creative certainty about the true image and status of man. Amidst
the bewildering assortment of styles and schools, which sprang up at this
period, it is possible to find only one common feature; the search for an
authentic form of expression. Did it lie in scientific accuracy or pure
fantasy? in moral judgement or ironical detachment? in sound ideas or
the pure music of words? These are some of the questions of the time, and
even the answers bear still the strain of uncertainty. It is this uncertainty
which has made later readers feel that in the style and form, language and
ideas, of many works of the period there is something not altogether
‘sound’, something affected, artificial, intellectual: all these epithets have
been associated with the term fin de siecle in art. The danger for so much
of the varied and intelligent writing of these closing decades of the century
is to appear dated : the doom always of mere ideas, however brilliant they
may be, which do not command the undivided belief of the imagination
and which do not therefore enter the flesh and blood of real experience.
Henry James (1843-1916) has good right to pride of place in a survey
of late-Victorian literature. He came to Europe as an American in search
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of a tradition, but although he acquired all its late refinements and some-
times showed an over-subtle aesthetic intelligence, he never lost his native
moral vigour. This rare combination of qualities, which were beginning to
appear so often mutually exclusive in his contemporaries, produced such
masterpieces as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903).
James well understood the problem and it provided him with his central
theme: the involvement of art, and what he called generally the ‘finer
consciousness ’ of a wealthy and ancient culture, in moral corruption and
evil. To love, to admire, to know, is to be initiated into pain and suffering,
and to possess is to partake in tragedy : this is the purely spiritual structure
of James’ curiously insubstantial stories about inheritance, discovery and
renunciation. His tragedies are not of the conventional kind; the struggle
is all between different visions and values, and it is souls, not people, who
are murdered. There is little direct contact with violence, either of action
or of passion, and even the material scene appears to recede farther and
farther into the background. The actual ‘subject matter’ of The Wings of
the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904) amounts to almost no more
than an elaborate play of consciousness, in which the characters them-
selves are all but reduced to a study of inner and largely abstract relation-
ships. Yet the aim of this extraordinary literary manoeuvre remains clear:
to redeem the wickedness of the world by sheer beauty of spirit. All
James’ later heroines, beginning with Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton
(1897) and including the amazing little girl of What Maisie Knew (1897),
have the gift of ‘making things right’; their love transcends treachery,
failure and death. The moral might be taken to be Christian, were it not of
the very essence of fine art which, so James believed, alone '‘makes life,
makes interest, makes importance ’ ; with the result that the triumphs of
his final novels resemble somewhat an eloquent pretence in the face of
unspeakable catastrophe, as though ‘ to recognise was to bring down the
avalanche’ and consequently ‘the specific, in almost any direction, was
utterly forbidden’. This criticism, however, is hardly relevant in the case
of the earlier novels, like The American (1877), The Princess Casamassima
(1886) and The Portrait of a Lady, where the evil eventually does break
loose, albeit only into something very like melodrama. James considered
the style of these works very imperfect, but their plainer account of the
problems of decadence may be preferred in a century which has less confi-
dence in the fagade of ‘good form’.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) stands at an opposite extreme from James
in the art of fiction; his style is comparatively simple and his setting rural,
his best figures are plain country folk and his tragedies down to earth.
His outstanding gift is a sense of dramatic occasion, and he has depicted
scenes of a power to earn him comparison with the Elizabethan play-
wrights. Yet through this same gift he has also incurred criticism, because
of his uncertainty about its use and meaning. Hardy knew the danger for
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the plainly realistic novelist: ‘a story must be worth the telling and a good
deal of life is not worth any such thing’. Thus he argued that art consisted
in a ‘ disproportioning of reality’, at which he showed his own skill by
contriving plots and situations of formidable improbability. A Pair of
Blue Eyes (1873) contains the most fantastic examples, but the habit per-
sists throughout his work, producing also many magnificent effects, and
it is the secret of all his best short stories ; for example. The Three Strangers
(1888, from Wessex Tales). Hardy did not, however, only exercise this
skill to give new life to the perennial tragi-comedy of human affairs ; he
also used it to explain them in a new way. He tried to establish a theory of
accident and malign chance, and thereby exculpate his characters from the
full burden of responsibility. In so doing he worked against them and to
some extent even against himself as their creator; for all literary interest
stems from the recognition of personal destiny in the chaos of events,
seizing upon those features of a man’s life which make it altogether his
story. Hardy’s philosophy is far less convincing than his characters, who
turn the unfortunate coincidences to which they are exposed into their
own terrible fate. Hardy only thought that the universe was essentially
chaotic and senseless, but his imagination spontaneously felt that there
was drama and some grand suggestion of significance in all those extra-
ordinary happenings and startling scenes which inspired him to write.
What this significance is cannot perhaps be formulated theoretically,
because it is all but inseparable from the details of what he intuitively
knew to be worth telling: glimpses of lyrical beauty and idyllic charm (for
instance, in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and The Trumpet Major
(1880)), of the mystery of myth and the terror of tragedy (in two of the
finest novels. The Return of the Native (1878) and The Mayor of Caster-
bridge (1886)), and of heroic strength and eternal folly (in Far from the
Madding Crowd (1874) and The Woodlanders (1887)). Only one thing is
lacking: the final coherence of the whole. Hardy’s poetic vision is dis-
turbed by prosaic insights, a fault which mars his style and is revealed still
more clearly in his poems (Wessex Poems (1898)); most of his poetry was
written after he had abandoned fiction, and falls outside the period. He
might genuinely see cruelty and pathos mingled in every beauty and joy,
sense that his beloved nature is compassionless, indifferent; it is all so
obvious and true, yet separated from the simplicity of wisdom by his banal
protests and theoretical comments. His ‘modern’ ideas caused a scandal
on the publication of Tessof the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure
(1896); but they are uninspiring platitudes by comparison with the noble
suffering of heroine and hero which they are supposed to remedy.
An interest in the remedial use of literature cannot be dismissed as a
mere flaw in the case of George Meredith (1828-1909): it is a constant
source of his inspiration. Success came to him slowly, but with Beau-
champ’s Career (1876), The Egoist (1879), and Diana of the Crossways
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(1885), he established himself as one of the worthies of the English novel.
What exactly his worth is depends less upon conventional merits of story-
telling, social realism or simple ‘characterisation’, where he rarely excels,
than upon the value allowed to the philosophical and analytical ‘uses’
for which he employs fiction. In a famous essay On the Idea of Comedy
(1877) he explicitly prescribes the ‘comic spirit’ as a corrective for the
world’s errors. The idea is as old as the theatre from which it is taken,
but it assumes new importance in Meredith’s philosophy of life. This
purports to be a doctrine of common sense, but is chiefly remarkable for
the mystifyingly oracular form in which it is uttered and which is typical of
his style. Never can spiritual temperance have been preached to such
excess, or plain dealing analysed in such complicated language, as in
Meredith’s prose and poetry. His ideal is a looking beyond self to see the
natural life, but his writing is notoriously full of intellectual conceits and
elaborate introspection. This paradox lies at the heart of Meredith’s
work, and is to be explained, not by elucidating more thoroughly the
meaning of what he thought, but by discovering what thinking as such
meant to him. It was like mental athletics : real skill at an artificial activity,
convulsive exercise in unnecessary difficulties for the sake of spiritual
health and beauty. Hence Meredith could claim, for instance, that prayer
is psychologically beneficial, even while disbelieving in any god. His
style offers a brilliant display of vigour; it is philosophical, epigrammatic,
lyrical, by turns; it combines comedy, romance, tragedy, satire; it only
does not quite convince that any of these effects is entirely true or neces-
sary, that such is the form the subject had to take. Meredith encountered
here already the main artistic problem of the twentieth century, the
problem of authenticity, and for this reason he has been hailed as a
modem writer; but he interpreted it in the more optimistic spirit of his
own age, assuming that the language and ideas of an entire tradition were
now all available for the purest intellectual sport, and he thereby became,
in fact, a virtuoso exponent of the grand manner. Thus his progressive
philosophy is made dignified and respectable enough for a Victorian
matron, and his satire of the high-bom world has the harmless air of
superior hobnobbing; he attacks the tyranny imposed on life by human
egotism and deluded vanity, yet only to increase the self-assurance of men
and women that they can master themselves and the world. Meredith
championed the cause of feminine emancipation and this theme recurs in
all his last novels, One of our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his
Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). His claim is not
political but psychological; namely, that the differences in mentality and
propriety enforced upon women are a sentimental invention designed by
men to flatter their own romantic interests. It was a crucial question of
the period, and seemed capable of undermining many traditional values in
society and literature. Meredith’s treatment of it, however, results only in
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a somewhat artificial mixture of romance and psychology. He works for
all the old benefits of charm and chivalry, while giving the comforting
illusion that he is freeing the ‘ sexual ’ relationship of all vain prejudice and
formality.
None of the other novelists of the period was destined to have his work
ranked among the national ‘classics’. Many, like Mark Rutherford
(1831-1913) or Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920), are in danger of being
forgotten, and the rapidly increasing mass of minor talent can perhaps
now only be of interest as a historical phenomenon. More and more
intelligent people sought meaning and sanction for their problems and
experiences by turning them into ‘literature’. The novel especially seems
to have emancipated all manner of spiritual energies which were no longer
absorbed or satisfied by traditional ways of life and thought. It is not
surprising, therefore, to find in the psychology of Sigmund Freud (1856—
1939) the suggestion that imaginative writing is meant to compensate for
satisfactions which the writer cannot know in reality. There are certainly
hints of a disillusioned theologian in Samuel Butler (1835-1902), and of a
frustrated scholar in George Gissing (1857-1903). The famous adventure
stories of R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) are like daydream fulfilments of a
boyish wish for excitement, and even Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) fears
the old heroism of the sea is lost and brings back his tales like curios from
remote and secret places. From the bright satire of Butler’s Erewhon
novels (1872 and 1901) to the dark tragedy of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900)
the reader is constantly reminded that the conventional code of manners
and outlook is false; but he may also be left either unconvinced or unsure
about what then is true. The truth seemingly lies in the very escape from
tyrannical convictions and hypocritical assurance — the theme of Butler's
The Way of all Flesh (1903); it lies in Conrad’s thrilled exploration of
sinister mysteries, no matter how uncertain their ultimate ‘meaning’; it
lies, in fact, in a new kind of literary freedom.
The doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is the most characteristic invention
of the period. Derived originally from the visual arts, it liberates literature
too from responsibility to any moral, religious or philosophical idea of
truth. It is not necessary to believe, much less to expound, such ideas in
art, but only to perceive beauty; and whether the beauty is ‘real’ no
longer matters, since everything depends on the artist’s power to perceive
beautifully. The importance of this doctrine must be judged against the
background of prevailing deadlock between theological and scientific
interpretations of the universe. One centre of that most celebrated of all
nineteenth-century disputes was Oxford, which presented a generally solid
front against materialists and agnostics alike. Here was discovered the
only basis on which the cause of the ‘spirit’ could ma^e any apparent
progress: through that cultural alliance of Christianity and Hellenism,
that revival of ailing faith with the reassurance of great literature, which
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Matthew Arnold had done so much to achieve, which John Ruskin
strengthened by his fervent rediscovery of painting and architecture, and
which culminated in the work of Walter Pater (1839-94). His Studies in
the History of the Renaissance (1873) and the philosophical romance
Marius the Epicurean (1885) are two of the most influential books of the
period. His scholarly style is an essay in perfection, reflecting his ideal of
‘refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition’ and striving
‘ towards the vision — the “ beatific vision ”, if we really cared to make it
such — of our actual experience’. This is the last romantic apotheosis of
genius, promising aesthetic triumph over doubt; life might be no more
than meaningless flux, but the beauty of a moment is eternalised in art;
even discredited conceptions of the world make lasting sense in poetry.
Well might Swinburne declaim ( Songs before Sunrise, 1871):
Glory to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master of things.
Echoes of Pater’s thought are to be discerned in the work of many
contemporaries. Conrad uses surprisingly similar language in his preface
to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) and even Gissing observes that ‘only
as artistic material has human life any consequence’. The extreme realism
which insists upon portraying ‘as it is’ all the ugliness and mediocrity
assembled in Gissing’s Demos (1886), The Nether World (1889), or New
Grub Street (1891), thus owns unexpected kinship with the cult of beauty
and brilliance which more obvious aesthetes, like George Moore (1852-
1933) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), derive directly from Pater. The two
tendencies are related by their common attempt to consider as ‘pure art’
aspects of life in which accepted notions of what is good, beautiful, and
true, are more or less subtly denied. Hence the fascination felt in England
for French literature with its vaunted immorality, the label which was
supposed to guarantee its aesthetic purity. There were, however, to be no
English rivals for Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt, Huysmans, or
Maupassant. Gissing’s writing is neither ironically detached nor ex-
quisitely stylised, it is morally depressing; for his style does not overcome,
but indulges, the bitterness of his feelings. Swinburne hails Baudelaire as
a brother in Ave atque Vale ( Poems and Ballads, 1866/1878/1889) but he
is superficial by comparison; the poetic licence and spiritual defiance he
proclaims have the ring rather of rhetorical effects than of real experi-
ences. Moore’s youthful extravagances and foreign imitations, analysed
in The Confessions of a Young Man (1888) have a character of self-
conscious affectation; he produced a minor scandal with Esther Waters
(1894), yet its excursions into forbidden subjects are less striking now than
its conventional moral sympathies. Even Wilde’s notorious Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891) is second-rate fiction for all its brilliantly perverse
ideas, while his most moving prose work, De Profundis (written after 1895
when he was in prison), records the tragedy and virtual renunciation of
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the aesthetic adventure. The same year saw the end of The Yellow Book
(1894-7), a periodical in book form which epitomises a minor fashion
for the shocking; The Savoy (1896), devoted still more outspokenly
to the cause of art for art’s sake, lasted only eight months. By 1902
Henry James apparently regards aestheticism as past, likening it to ‘a
queer high-flavoured fruit from overseas ’ which could never suit English
taste.
Wilde’s most exotic work, Salome, was characteristically first written in
French, banned from production in London, then published and per-
formed in Paris (1893/6). His social comedies proved more acceptable;
the immoral hints of Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and An Ideal Husband
(1894) might be taken as no more than clever jests in a conventional world
of make-believe. Wilde’s masterpiece. The Importance of being Earnest
(1895), succeeds in carrying the logic of inverted truth, upon which his wit
largely depends, just safely across the threshold into inspired nonsense
where criticism would be out of place ; the fun lies in seeing how much of
recalcitrant normality turns out to make comic sense in its new sur-
roundings.
This was perhaps the only domain in which the English public knew
how to enjoy the art for its own sake, having learnt in childhood from
Edward Lear (1812-88) and Lewis Carroll (1832-98) and adopted in later
years the burlesque operas of Gilbert and Sullivan as a national institution.
W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) had a considerable satiric gift, but his straight
plays and, more unjustly, his Bab Ballads ( 1 869/73) are now forgotten beside
his famous libretti, from Trial by Jury (1875) to The Grand Duke (1896),
in which the satire is transmuted by music and pantomine into innocuous
absurdity. His playful mockery of British customs and characteristics soon
established itself as a way of celebrating a patriotic affection for them.
The younger satirist of the stage, G. B. Shaw (1856-1950), turned his
humour to more earnest ends; his comedy at the expense of the military,
Arms and the Man (1894), contains an ideological element that is absent
from, say, H.M.S. Pinafore (1878). For Shaw professed a radical attitude
towards social problems, partly because he shared (with less consistency)
the political views of Sidney Webb, for whom he edited the Fabian Essays
in Socialism (1889), but partly also because he hoped to find in them the
basis of a modern dramatic revival, such as he proclaimed in The Quintes-
sence of lbsenism (1891). Although the greater part of his work lies outside
the period, his Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) and Three Plays for
Puritans (1901) give a fair indication of its foundations and stature. It is
clearly not made of the same imaginative stuff as Ibsen’s drama. Shaw
came into his own as an intellectual of the 1 890’s, and his wit was trained
in that school of modish paradox at which Wilde and Max Beerbohm
excelled. A practised critic of music and literature, he expects art ‘ to culti-
vate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling,
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smelling and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us,
protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frowsy
clothing and foul air’. This sounds like Pater again, prescribed as a pro-
gramme of social improvement. Inevitably, reviewers of Shaw have
questioned his use of art for moral purposes : ‘ his ideas are good, but his
characters and plots artificial ’, has been the common objection. In fact,
Shaw’s genius is at its best in deriving genuine possibilities of dramatic
dialogue and comic scene from radical ideas ; it is rather the ideas which
become artificial in the process, and his play with moral purposes for the
sake of art, for literary effects and intellectual brilliance, which is most
questionable.
Over against the artistic intellectualism of the period must be set
instances of straightforward belief in empire and the manly virtues, such
as may be found in writers like Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) or the
barely remembered William Henley (1 849-1903). Kipling’s Barrack Room
Ballads (1892) and The Seven Seas (1896) have been dismissed as mere
‘verse’, but he hit upon an important poetic problem, if not upon much
important poetry, in his effort to rescue lyrical themes and language from
that romantic dreamland full of rhetorical echoes which proved so alluring
to many Victorian poets. Kipling’s solution is to use dialect and vulgar
speech, and to insist on the romance of actual places and material things;
above all he fights for a sense of community and publicly shared experi-
ences, which had steadily faded from poetry since the eighteenth century.
In his short stories (Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three, etc., 1888)
he is not the subtle novelist of character but the raconteur, who has wit-
nessed some stirring adventure out in India, where Englishmen are
exposed to elementary lessons in real life from which they are protected
in their effetely civilised home. Kipling is the natural enemy of liberals
and aesthetes alike ; unfortunately, he is less intelligent than they, and too
uncritically allies himself with the less defensible aspects of imperial suc-
cess. He has neither the brilliance of Shaw nor the ingenuity of H. G.
Wells (1866-1946), yet he senses an abiding order of things to which
wonder and courage provide the only key; and perhaps for this reason his
work, though rarely profound and sometimes distasteful, seems nearer
than theirs to the traditional springs of poetry.
To regain the source of fully expressive language, of words which both
mean something significant and are something significant, becomes the
crucial task for the future of the poetic tradition. Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-89) and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) are decisively affected by
it and, whether what they have accomplished is in the nature of a new
beginning or a final experiment, they are still regarded as the greatest
modern English poets. Hopkins’ brief work, some 1400 lines of poetry,
was published only in 1918, while Yeats’ earlier collections ( Crossways ,
1889; The Rose, 1893; The Wind among the Reeds, 1899) give only slight
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indication of his later achievement in The Tower (1928), to which he owes
his fame. Nevertheless, some discussion of their style is proper here
because of its affinities, the more striking in the case of Hopkins for being
free of foreign influence, with a poetic movement which begins to emerge
in Europe generally during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This
movement is as extensive, though not so clearly defined, as its ‘ Romantic ’
predecessor; to call it ‘Symbolist’ is to refer to its chief characteristic
rather than its accepted title. The common feature of its many forms is a
loosening of the reins of metaphor. Traditionally, the images of poetry
have been held in close obedience to meaning; symbolism springs from a
distrust and partial loss of such conventional guidance. What a symbol
‘means’ in modem poetry is usually not stated and may never become
very clear; in extreme cases it does not even seem to matter. The mental
picture and the verbal sound are thrown into new artistic relief by being
thrown out of ordinary intellectual context. Thus Hopkins has attempted
all kinds of syntactical irregularities, while Yeats makes use of an esoteric
and frequently unexplained series of ideas.
Since the aim of the symbolist writer is to raise the status of poetic
expression, he turns away from discursive or descriptive style, such as
produced ‘the decorative landscape and still life’, as Yeats called it, of his
early poems, a phrase that might also serve for what little remains of
Hopkins’ immature manner. No symbolist is content, in fact, merely to
write ‘about’ something; any mere impassioned dressing up of thoughts
and feelings ‘about’ a subject leads, he suspects, only to rhetoric, a con-
vention as unacceptable now as realism in painting. Poetic language has
to fulfil, for Yeats, an almost religious function, though in quite the
reverse sense from preaching a sermon. Great poetry is like a ‘church,
where there is an altar but no pulpit’, in that it celebrates mysteries beside
which moral comment is superficial. Hence Yeats’ interest in Celtic
myths, mystical symbols, ‘visionary’ writing, and apocalyptic movements
of history. Most of these themes have had to be also elucidated in prose;
the poems endeavour in some way to enact or evoke them, as though the
words themselves were playing a part in a ritualistic cult. This is why
Yeats so admired Blake, who ‘announced the religion of art’, and why,
looking back to the age of Spenser when ‘ the earth had still its sheltering
sacredness’, he so deeply laments the loss to poetry of this sense of holy
patronage. Hopkins actually became a priest in the Society of Jesus, a
decision which at first caused him to give up writing as falling altogether
below the demands of devotion and divine service. When eventually he
made a fresh start with The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), he achieved
his finest and truly distinctive work through a supreme effort to infuse
language, which had grown tired in the service of secular ends and profane
conventions, with the intensity of his faith, and thereby turn it into an
act of praise.
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As a literary term ‘symbolism’ originates in France, where it was first
introduced by Jean Moreas (1856-1910) in 1885; although only minor
poets then publicly adhered to it as a school, it has since been taken to
include the work of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), Stephane Mallarme
(1842-98) and Paul Verlaine (1844-96). Rimbaud’s literary career lasted
barely more than three years. He produced his first poems while still a
schoolboy in 1870, and with an unprecedented display of early genius
showed himself able to master and equal anything that nineteenth-century
French poetry had yet accomplished, rivalling even Baudelaire in power
or Gautier in technical skill. In his Illuminations, published only in 1886
by Verlaine, after he himself had renounced writing, he explored the limits
of whatever was likely still to be attained by symbolism. His collected
work can, indeed, be regarded as a symbolic history of the modern poetic
mind, culminating in the strange and tragic document, Une Saison en enfer
(1873), which records its ultimate despair. From what region of the soul
do the images of poetry arise? Do words have the magic power to evoke
any experience, or are they the beginning of hallucination? These are the
questions which Rimbaud has explored, not philosophically but by experi-
menting with every emotional and intellectual possibility that imagination
can conceive, even systematically deranging his normal senses to ‘reach
the unknown’. Lured by the ‘alchemy of language’ which promised
poetry from spiritual chaos, he appears at times to have cut himself off
from the real world entirely, and at times again to be in a state of pure
awareness of material things. He combines the two extremes of con-
temporary sensibility, the poetry which is all of the mind, and the realism
which is its disgusted denial. He sees visions of fantastic beauty, yet feels
himself to be in hell and knows that it is ‘ Satan . . . who loves in a writer
the absence of any descriptive or instructive faculties’. The shadow of
some terrible damnation falls across the brief work of this prince of
symbolists, who thought to remake the universe in poetic splendour
beyond good and evil, and almost emptied it at a stroke of any certain
meaning.
Mallarme’s personality is pale by comparison. The slender volume of
his poetry is no less rich in obscurity, though not the work of any so
sudden, compelling inspiration; it bears the meticulous marks of elaborate
intellectual construction over a period of nearly forty years. In his prose
{Pages, 1891; La Musique et les lettres, 1894; Divagations, 1897) and in
occasional lines in his poems Mallarme has communicated his ideal of
music as the ultimate secret of words, rejecting as an illusion what he
oddly considered the only alternative: namely, ‘the claim to enclose in
language the material reality of things’. This is the echo of an ancient
philosophic debate, in which a symbolist poet now reopens the case
against realism, taking his stand by a concept of art with pretensions to
great psychological subtlety. A statement is true in poetry by virtue of its
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suggestiveness, by its power to evoke a dream-like state, by the emotional
satisfaction of its cadence, and by its artificial stimulation of the imagina-
tive senses. The result purports to be some kind of pure spiritual pleasure,
as remote from reality as music. Yet pure remoteness from ordinary
experience alone offers no criterion for the greatness of art, nor are
emotions necessarily pure for being of the spirit instead of ‘real’, as
Mallarme might have discovered from the example of Rimbaud, or even
heard in the music of Wagner to whom he wrote his Hommage. What his
poetry actually achieves is a blend of abstraction and sensuality, where
almost meaningless images act like irritants on the nerves, and inscrutable
snatches of thought are coupled with confused desires. U Apres-midi d'un
faune (1876) and Herodiade (1899) are more or less explicitly erotic
reveries; the latter, with its theme of narcissistic virginity, obsessed
Mallarme throughout his life, and both reveal the same effete refinement
of any real emotion into ‘pure’ aesthetic sensations. Un Coup de des
jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) is neither prose nor poetry, but a compo-
sition of phrases irregularly spaced across the page, to render Mallarme’s
only ‘real’ experience: the experience of words. For him the perfect
phrase, indeed the magic word, came before the completed sentence, and
might never arrive at a rationally comprehensible theme. The traditional
idea of beauty or significance as necessarily attributes of some coherent
whole seems to have all but disappeared in a neurotic obsession with the
parts. Mallarme can commit himself to no more than the single image, the
exquisite combination of several sounds. This is his ‘absolute’, for of this
alone is he sure. Yet he knows too that such thoughts are no more than
‘throws of a dice’ and ever at the mercy of ‘chance’ : the vulgar universe
of mere accident which lies beyond the narrow confines of his mind.
Verlaine’s symbolism is of a far simpler order and presents the reader
with few problems in understanding. Though his Art poetique (1884)
denounces conventional rhetoric and speaks of words as if they were
colours or musical effects, he actually uses them to write ‘about’ easily
recognisable experiences, and is unorthodox mainly in his metrical innova-
tions. These are designed to assist in the production of a mood, which is
the predominant characteristic of his poetry, and which a minor con-
temporary poet, Tristan Corbiere, described as an ‘impure mixture of
everything’. Verlaine employs a rich variety of images, only to achieve a
remarkable sameness of tone. To judge from Pauvre Leliati, a commentary
on his own work which he wrote for his collection of essays on Les Poetes
maudits (1884/8), this was a considered ideal. He desires, ‘since Man,
mystic yet sensual, remains still an intellectual creature ’, the same response
to either extreme of human experience, for they are each only ‘varied
manifestations of a single thought with its ups and downs’. Thus, the
wisdom of taking the good with the bad becomes a technique for taking
both as a poetic sensation; even the sense of sin appears to be a refine-
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ment of aesthetic pleasure. Verlaine’s skill lies in evoking the emotional
and almost physical charm of his spiritual interludes, and in detecting
some ethereal or sentimental tremor in his more earthy adventures.
Between an early work like La Bonne Chanson (1870) and Parallelement
(1888) his themes undoubtedly grow more serious; but his skill remains
unchanged, the interchanges between the soul and the flesh varying the
artistic effects rather than lending them moral interest, until in the end the
play upon mood and verbal music seems merely monotonous. Verlaine’s
temperament is too passive for true greatness; equally ready for self-
abandon in debauch or piety, he cultivates sorrows that are blurred with
pleasurable indulgence, and degradations that are languid with regret.
The aesthetic exploitation of life and the symbolist exploration of
imagery both imply an attitude of profound disdain or disbelief towards
the once common values and experiences which men shared in the world.
It may take the form characterised by Pater in his epicurean of ideas and
creeds, or by Paul Valery (1871-1945) in La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste
(1896), the writer who is amost reduced to silence because he finds even
language too grossly real to express the pure processes of the intellect.
The most notorious aesthetes of the period are the Duke Des Esseintes
and Count Axel of Auersburg, fictitious aristocrats of man’s inner estate.
The former is the hero of A rebours (1884), a novel by J.-K. Huysmans
(1848-1907); he is shown in his solitary ‘paradise’, an indoor world well
stocked with stimulants for his curious senses and with a library of
decadent literature. Here he retires from all contact with society, is con-
vinced that even ‘nature has had its day’ as a subject worthy of interest,
and finds it unnecessary now to make any journeys into a world which he
can far better enjoy in his reading and his imagination. Axel (1890) is a
dramatic poem in prose by Villiers de lTsle-Adam (1838-89); it conveys a
still more exalted, and questionable, message of spiritual ascendancy in
luxurious tones and emotionally voluptuous scenes, which may have been
intended to produce effects of Wagnerian grandeur, but which read rather
like an invention of Edgar Allen Poe. In the depths of the Black Forest,
in an ancient castle. Count Axel studies the hermetic philosophy of the
alchemists. He has no desire for the vast wealth which could be his, and
kills the self-styled representative of ‘real life’ who comes to disturb his
inner peace. A beautiful girl tempts him with romantic dreams of all the
wide world offers them, but again he resists. In their imagination they
have ‘exhausted the future’, the reality would be nothing by comparison:
‘Live? our servants will do that for us.’ And in the fullest pride of youth,
with magnificent treasures at their feet, they commit suicide in an ecstasy
of unrealised love.
Villiers’ Catholic conscience was troubled by the morality of such an
ending, which yet appealed so deeply to his imaginative instincts. More
is involved than the particular transgressions in the plot or even Axel’s
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heretical philosophising. Huysmans in his later novels ( La-bas , 1891 ; La
Cathedrale, 1898; L'Oblat, 1903) writes increasingly in harmony with
Christian doctrine, yet leaves similar doubts in the mind. For such other-
worldliness as delights the decadent imagination of so many late nine-
teenth-century writers is the inevitable prey of the psychologist who
sees in it the expression of some perverse inner need rather than of
any external or ‘real’ truth. To understand the nature of this distinction is
to understand the seriously divided mind of the period. For, obviously,
many values and ideas to which society or individuals are attached could
be explained away as indirect gratifications (‘ sublimations ’ is the psycho-
logist’s word) of subconscious motives, if once an explanation of this sort
is felt to be decisive. It had long been toyed with: for instance, by
satirists bent on exposing hypocrisy; only gradually did it acquire the
weight of an apparently crushing blow at almost all ‘pretensions’ to
civilised living and thinking. Such a psychology, which aims at reducing
every spiritual phenomenon to some more material cause, is clearly
modelled on a scientific concept of truth, but is itself at best a pseudo-
science, incapable of establishing proof; it might more accurately be
described as a state of mind influenced by science.
One of the more frequently repeated cliches of the time is that know-
ledge must be based on facts; but what are the facts in the case of a
religious belief, a moral standard, or an artistic form? Earlier in the
nineteenth century it had been supposed that they were environmental and
operated from without, a scheme of things borrowed from the physical
sciences. The next step was prompted by the later development of the
biological sciences: environment is no more than a conditioning factor,
and what really underlies the activities of consciousness is some vital force,
manifesting itself as emotional energy, which operates from within. Such
theories make great show of being factual, but much will depend on what
is counted as evidence, and even more on what interpretation is put upon
it. One tendency, which was particularly strong in France, reaches its
extreme in Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881): it is almost
fanatically nihilistic in its exposure of all intellectual and emotional en-
deavour as illusory and farcical. A similar tendency is expressed in various
countries and genres by the naturalist movement, which includes some of
the shabbiest and most hopeless views of man ever taken. These are not,
however, the only possible interpretation. For their starting-point is
vague and ambiguous; it amounts to the general notion that whatever
ideals a man may cherish, whether religious, moral, practical, or artistic,
they are likely to be ‘only true psychologically’; and this idea can be
interpreted in the opposite, the proudest, sense — the sense of the symbolists
and aesthetes. For them poetry need only be true psychologically; the
mind is free to create its own satisfactions and fabricate what pleasures,
what knowledge it will; the imagination can engineer even religious
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exultation by playing on the right emotions. Wagner was the master-
builder of this inner world, and towards the end of the century his music
was treated almost as a cult to celebrate the conquest of the soul. Despite
his incomparably greater genius, however, the same suspicion now falls on
the mystical celebrations of Parsifal (1882) as upon Axel. This is not to
doubt the virtue of man’s ancient striving to transcend material things,
but only the manner in which it has been represented. And the doubt is
perhaps justified to the extent to which Wagner and Villiers, Huysmans,
and indeed many other ‘artists of the spirit’, were themselves psycho-
logists rather than believers, and were sometimes led by their tastes and
talent to find in the search for spiritual purity a pretext for subtle aesthetic
orgies.
Naturalism had originated in France during the 1 86o’s with the novels
produced in collaboration by Edmond de Goncourt (1822-96) and his
brother Jules (1830-70). A commentary on its origins and theory is pro-
vided by their Journal of the time, published later, with considerable
additions, by Edmond between 1887 and 1896. Not for the first time a
new departure in art is inspired by the feeling that past conventions have
been unnatural, that literature is not sufficiently like life; but instead of a
return to nature and feeling, naturalism demands a more scientific record
of behaviour. Emile Zola (1840-1902), the greatest novelist of the new
school, expounds the same ideal in Le Roman experimental (1880), and he
also adopted the method of making a careful compilation of notes and
facts for every novel. In an early lecture on Balzac (1866), whom he claims
as a precursor, he likens the writer to a surgeon or chemist, able imparti-
ally to dissect or establish laws of cause and effect in the human organism.
It is Zola’s favourite comparison and typifies the naturalist movement ; it
would have been endorsed by the Goncourts, who similarly speak of
‘clinical’ analysis in fiction, and probably also by Flaubert.
The obvious problem for the naturalist writer is that a novel can hardly
be, in any literal sense, an experiment or a record; everything in it is
invented, or at least selected, then arranged and given stylistic utterance,
in accordance with quite non-scientific requirements of scene and story,
suspense and resolution, pathos and tragedy. This is why Edmond de
Goncourt claimed that their works ‘had tried, above all else, to kill the
plot in the novel’; and why Flaubert, equally aware of a discrepancy
between scientific purpose and artistic execution, attempted extraordinary
stylistic manoeuvres to overcome it. Zola seems only rarely to have con-
sidered the difficulty, and wrote in a style which has about it little to
suggest scientific detachment. He is a quite unscrupulous manipulator of
literary effects, who stops at nothing to evoke a strong emotional response
in the reader ; with the result that his writing has been called lurid, obscene,
coarse, vulgar. For all this (and excepting passages which are merely
dull), it is difficult to deny its power. This is of a peculiar, possibly unique,
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kind : it works, if such a distinction can be made, on the literary senses
rather than on the literary intelligence, sustaining them with a pleasure so
uncritical that it scarcely varies, even where the subject is horrible and sad.
Its chief danger, therefore, is to produce a surfeit; but where it does not,
then the imagination eagerly awaits more sensations, not in the form of
complex adventures, but from continued contact with physical impres-
sions: such as might well pass for the very raw material of life, but for the
fact, of course, that the whole experience is manufactured out of words.
Zola’s true artistic affinities are perhaps less with such fastidious and
intelligent social portraitists as the Goncourts, than with the musician
who composed his operas on the same massive scale, and exploited similar
effects of sheer emotional power in professed service of a high-minded
truth: Richard Wagner.
Between 1871 and 1893 Zola published twenty novels, planned as a
series under the general title of Les Rougon-Macquart and giving ‘the
social and natural history of a family during the Second Empire’. The
particular truth he wishes to establish is the deterministic influence of
heredity upon all the ‘instinctive manifestations of human character,
which produce what convention knows as virtues and vices’. The con-
genital tendency of the Rougon-Macquart is, however, nothing more
specific than an ‘overflowing of the natural appetites’, which Zola any-
way considers typical of an age altogether bent upon physical enjoyments.
The family so distributes itself that he has an opportunity to portray all
sections of the national life; he succeeds best with the Parisian working
class (U Assommoir, 1877), the downtrodden poor of a mining village
( Germinal , 1885), and the doomed army of the Franco-Prussian war (La
Debacle, 1892), the culminating disaster of which he says, revealingly, that
he ‘needed it as an artist’. In his later novels, Les Trois Villes (1894/8),
and Les Quatre Lvangiles (1899-1903), Zola became the prophet of some
brave, new humanity, denouncing religious superstition and proclaiming
the gospel of Fecundity, Work, Truth and Justice. During the last years
of his life he even achieved the glory of a martyr, and temporary exile,
through his famous articles in defence of Dreyfus (J' accuse). His political
and philosophical ideas present, however, the weakest aspect of his work,
and the weakness extends in some measure also to his understanding of
character, if this is judged by the high intellectual standards of the nine-
teenth-century novel. Zola’s justification is hinted at in his preface to
Therese Raquin (2nd ed. 1868): ‘My intention has been to study tempera-
ments not characters.’ In practice this came to mean that his own
imaginative temperament played the dominant role in his characters’
experiences, the practice less of a literary scientist than of a poet. With the
result that, where his imagination is engaged most passionately, Zola
seems to carry the whole vast fatalistic scheme of vice and degradation
beyond reach or need of psychological analysis or social explanation. He
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makes descriptions of simple emotions and physical things sound like a
mythological celebration of elemental mysteries, surrounding them with
an air of demonic intensity which is out of any scientific proportion to the
real wretchedness of the actual actors and action and scene.
In 1880 naturalism established itself publicly as a literary school through
a joint publication, Les Soirees de Medan, prefaced by an aggressive
declaration of principles, containing short stories by six authors; these
were Zola, Huysmans (who only later found his true medium in aesthetic
and religious fiction), three minor novelists: Paul Alexis (1851-1901),
Henri Ceard (1851-1924), and Leon Hennique (1851-1935), and finally
Guy de Maupassant (1850-93). In the judgement of Flaubert, who for a
time had been teacher to Maupassant, the contribution of his pupil, Boule
de suif entirely ‘crushed’ the others. The results of this tuition were long
apparent in the ironical factuality and terse exactitude of Maupassant’s
style. He shows a far finer, though less powerful, talent than Zola, excel-
ling above all in his short stories, of which he produced more than three
hundred, many of them masterpieces; La Maison Tellier (together with
En famille, 1881), Mile Fifi (1883), Miss Harriett (together with Le
Bapteme), Yvette, and M. Parent (1884) are among the best. Maupassant’s
naturalism quickly won him notoriety and success; by his high skill with
low subjects, his brilliant exposure of shabby gentility, his literary nicety
in recounting crude or carnal behaviour, he blended vulgarity with
extreme sophistication in a way to suit contemporary tastes tired of more
solemn realism. He is persistently pessimistic, yet in a manner which
frequently tends towards the thin acerbity of witty cynicism ; and for all
his wide range of observation and invention, he gives the impression now
of having greatly diminished life’s potentialities. In the preface to his
most substantial novel, Pierre et Jean (1888), he comments that ‘everyone
forms for himself an illusion of the world, which is poetic, or sentimental,
or joyful, or melancholy, or unclean, or dismal, according to his nature.
The writer’s only task is to reproduce this illusion faithfully ’ The
danger for such a writer is that this psychological insight is likely to
reduce virtually all experience to one category, the category of illusion and
disillusion, to be represented in an endless variety of instances but always
fundamentally the same. The effect might be tedious were not Maupas-
sant’s artistry so great in being able to concentrate his whole point into a
single scene, a place, a person, an anecdote. He is the master of the
fleeting charm, the tell-tale moment, the cruel accident, but his resources
seem not quite adequate sometimes to account, at novel length, for the
energy inspiring a whole career ( Bel Ami, 1 885) or the shape of a whole
life ( Une Vie, 1883). The only realities in Maupassant’s world of illusions
are, of course, the senses; variously gratified or frustrated, they in-
explicably lure life onward, colouring it sometimes brightly, sometimes
sombrely. They represent for naturalism the irreducible phenomenon, ‘la
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joie de vivre’ of Zola’s bitter novel by that name, physical existence
asserting itself in a spiritual void. Such a vision of mortal futility stirs on
occasions even in Maupassant’s humorous and detached mind a senti-
ment of pity, though it is mingled with nausea and horrified fascination.
The sentiment is purer, being founded on a genuine affection for man
and beast, in the work of Alphonse Daudet (1840-97). Though he was
closely associated with the leaders of the naturalist movement, practised
their method of keeping notebooks on all he witnessed or heard, and
could produce such pieces of painful documentation as Femmes d’ artistes
(1874) or grim details of war and slums in some of the Contes du lundi
(1873), it is for the fantasy and charm of his stories about the Midi
( Lettres de mon moulin, 1869), and above all for Tartarin de Tarascon
(1872), one of the great comic creations of French literature, that he will
be remembered. If many of Daudet’s novels have declined from their
once considerable popularity ( Fromont jeune et Risler aine, 1874; Le
Nabob , 1877; Numa Roumestan, 1881) this may be due to a certain un-
evenness in his later technique and style. For he only half assimilated the
influences of naturalism, and half remained the writer of indulgent feeling
whose first subject had been his own childhood (Le Petit chose, 1868).
Though he dedicated his account of religious mania in VPvangeliste (1883)
to the famous neurologist Charcot, and earned Zola’s praise for his
analysis of a degrading passion in Sapho (1884), Daudet’s ‘naturalistic’
psychology is weak by comparison with his power of sympathy. This
easily degenerates into sentimentality, the inherent flaw in that vein of
pathetic sensibility which runs through all his work, but at its best it
inspires in him a fond attachment for people and places, and a compassion
for humble misfortune, that has suggested to many readers a likeness to
Dickens.
The limitations of a concise history are particularly unjust in the case of
French literature, where many distinguished names must be dismissed
with only a brief mention. The extreme opposition of literary schools in
the period helps at least to place certain minor poets clearly within the
symbolist tradition, such as Albert Samain, Gustave Kahn, and Rene
Ghil, together with the American-born Stuart Merrill and Francis Viele-
Griffin; and it further conveniently distinguishes between, on the one
hand, the naturalistic drama produced by Andre Antoine at his Theatre
Libre, where adaptations of Zola and original plays by Henri Becque
were eventually eclipsed by Ibsen, and on the other hand, Lugne-Poe’s
Theatre de l’CEuvre, which first experimented with the symbolist pieces of
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). The early work of this Belgian play-
wright-philosopher, although it often betrays too glib a use of vaguely
portentous symbols, has yet proved rich in suggestive hints for other
writers (Pirandello and Yeats were both influenced by him), for stage and,
later, film producers, and for Debussy whose music has probably saved
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his Pelleas et Melisande (1892) from oblivion. Maeterlinck was to achieve
greater fame, however, with his scientific and metaphysical writings (the
famous series on insect life begins in 1901 with La Vie des abeilles );
although such works as Le Tresor des humbles (1896) have been praised
for their beauty of style, and his poet’s sense for the essential mysterious-
ness of life has been of greater literary than philosophical importance, the
story of his lifelong inquiry into its meaning belongs rather to the history
of thought.
Restlessness of mind, the search for new forms of expression, reliable
ideas, and some authentic attitude to life, drove many writers of the time
from one style or philosophy or experiment to another, and thus make it
impossible to classify them in this school or that. The four poets elected
to the Academie Frangaise during the period — Sully Prudhomme (1881),
Francois Coppee (1884), Leconte de Lisle (1886), and J.-M. de Heredia
(1894) — alone preserved some measure of continuity with older conven-
tions, affirming a ‘pamassian’ tradition of style and sentiment; but the
more interesting developments were less academic. Jean Moreas,the
symbolist, turned away from that movement to found an ‘Jficole romane’,
a neo-classical reaction from overly intellectual and introverted poetry in
favour of a Mediterranean ideal of plastic simplicity, wherein he met a
distinguished ally in Charles Maurras, a former disciple of Mistral.
Frederic Mistral (1830-1914) is the only remembered poet of a Provencal
revival, typical of various attempts during the last hundred years to dis-
cover in ancient local traditions (here that of the troubadours) a way of
living, and certainly of writing about life, more colourfully and fully than
seemed possible in contemporary urban civilisation. Only the Belgian
Emile Verhaercn (1855-1916) succeeded in winning occasionally great
poetry from this unpromising scene, using symbolist techniques developed
in more personal volumes that culminate in Les Flambeaux noirs (1890), to
convey the socialist indignation, fraternal pity, and visionary criticism
inspired in him by the sight of the modem human condition. For Henri
de Regnier (1864-1936) man’s departed glory could be caught at best in
elegiac echoes of the past or dreamy fantasies, while for the still younger
poets Paul Claudel and Charles Peguy it had to be regained through a
return to the Catholic faith, from which they believed the subtleties of
poetic sensibility might alone recover some real purpose and meaning.
Claudel’s earliest inspiration was intimately connected with his discovery
of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and he claimed to see in the infernal light of
that apparently disruptive and disrupted imagination the possibility (or
was it simply a dire need?) of a divine order ; certainly, not to find it left
poetry too easily inclined towards mere ironic celebrations of disorder,
such as mark the work of Jules Laforgue (1860-87).
A considerable Catholic and conservative revival is also one of the more
striking tendencies among writers of prose, whether fiction, criticism or
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philosophy, towards the end of the century ; and this tendency coincided
with a general reaction against the spiritual emptiness of naturalism, first
expressed critically by Brunetiere (Le Roman naturaliste, 1883). Paul
Bourget (1852-1935), whose sense of responsibility for youth at the mercy
of pernicious intellectual influences inspired Le Disciple (1889), and who
tried to analyse the mental components of the age in Essais de psychologie
contemporaine (1883/5), began a series of religious novels with L'Etape
(1903), in which he exposed the inadequacies of a materialistic democracy.
Maurice Barres (1862-1923), though by nature a wanderer and an aesthete,
outgrew his purely anarchical concern with the inner individual alone, to
search for the secret of the good life within a still uncorrupted community :
and this meant for him the provincial, conservative society of Lorraine
(not Paris, which he condemns in Les Deracines, 1 897), and came also to
mean a Catholic society, as still later novels show. There were, of course,
other solutions, other distractions, of which two examples must suffice by
way of conclusion: Pierre Loti (1850-1923), the nom de plume of a naval
officer, who enjoyed a great success with his sentimental stories and
descriptions of distant lands, his glimpses of simpler people and a more
natural way of life ( Pecheur d'Islande, 1886); and Anatole France (1844-
1924), who captured that section of the intellectually-minded public which
wanted ideas dealt with in an elegantly cultured and rationally reassuring
manner, and was prepared to follow him in his anti-clerical socialism.
To turn from the variously opposed extremes to which French poets
and novelists were pushing their exploration of the modern mind and
world, to the fiction of their contemporaries writing in German ( Dichter ,
as they may be called in that language without regard to an absolute dis-
tinction between poetry and prose) is to enter a different realm of the
imagination. It is also, apparently, to turn back in time. Besides such
obvious pointers as the use of historical themes by Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer (1825-98) and to a lesser extent by Theodor Fontane (1819-98), or
more subtle hints of bygone romanticism in the nostalgic reminiscences of
Theodor Storm (1817-88) and of some altogether older fashion in the
stories of Gottfried Keller (1819-90), which seem to have no temporal
location at all, there is a common link between each of these otherwise
dissimilar writers and the past : their style. This is known as ‘ poetic realism ’,
and it maintains and develops an artistic tradition of language, a classic
manner, which dates back to the period of literary renaissance in Germany
at the beginning of the century.
Was it the unique accomplishment of that late cultural revival, with its
romantic music and philosophies of art, or some accident of national
temperament or political disunity, even backwardness, that German
literature remained for so long largely out of touch with the unpoetic
realities of the increasingly industrial and scientific age? Explanations are
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idle beside the fact that the imagination of so many German writers con-
tinued to inhabit an ideal world — ideal not because it is morally perfect
but because it fulfils certain literary conventions — at a time when in other
countries conventional limitations were being drastically revised. Thus,
when Fontane writes about the Berlin and Prussian provinces of his day,
he sets and describes his scenes (such as excursions into the country or
formal visits) in a way which would allow them to take their place in a
narrative by Goethe or Stifter. The case is similar with C. F. Meyer: his
heroic idyll ( Hutten , 1871), his novel about the wild and tragic Swiss
patriot Jiirg Jenatsch (1876) which he first attempted as a drama, his tales
of great heroes and criminals and events of the past packed with psycho-
logical ‘moments’ of extreme pathos (from Der Heilige, 1879, to Pescara,
1887, and Angela Borgia, 1891), together with his belief that ‘art alone
raises us above the trivialities of existence’, his admiration of Schiller,
and his revulsion from the ‘brutal actuality of contemporary subjects’:
everything suggests a disappointed candidate for the classical German
theatre rather than a late nineteenth-century novelist.
The other Swiss representative of poetic realism, Gottfried Keller, is
undoubtedly one of the finest and most original writers in the language,
but if his humour is all his own, his use of literature for moral enlighten-
ment, his lasting concern over his ‘ educational novel ’, Der griine Heinrich
(1854/79 : the changes in style and form in the second version are designed
to bring out more clearly the true lesson of experience), and above all his
ideal of Humanitat, that untranslatable concept which is the cornerstone
of German classicism, uniting humanitarian and aesthetic virtues in a
noble vision of the good life : all this is again traditional. And how unlike
any other places in European fiction are the Seldwyla and Zurich depicted
in Keller’s two collections of stories. Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856, con-
tinued 1874) and Die Ziiricher Novellen (1878)! The facts about life in the
provinces probably do not vary so decisively from country to country,
yet Keller has transformed them into the stuff of ballad and legend,
humorously bestowing upon domestic episode now epic dignity, now
lyrical feeling, and with such perfect naturalness that it is hard to believe
that Flaubert or George Eliot were his contemporaries as students of the
provincial scene. Keller is also the foremost poet among this group of
novelists, who are further remarkable for the amount and excellence of
their poetry; even Fontane, who comes closest to conventional realism in
his novels, is the author of several beautiful poems. Theodor Storm’s
popularity has been chiefly established by his song-like poetry in the
German romantic style ; his career as a realist shows a gradual develop-
ment from such entirely lyrical stories as Immensee (1852) to Der Schim-
melreiter (1888), his nearest approach to a novel. Opinion is divided over
this last work as over Keller’s Martin Salamander (1886); by their scope
and substance they exceed the ideal limits of the ‘poetic’ tradition (better
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suited to the form of the Novelle, or long story) and enter the wider world
of the European novel; here their danger is so to loosen the close spell of
imaginative interest that they appear, after all, merely provincial.
Fontane just escapes this fault, while yet extending the tradition to
include at least one of the subjects more widely recognised as realistic: the
social and psychological problems of marriage and infidelity. In all his
better works (Schach von Wuthenow, 1883; L'Adultera, 1882; Graf Petofy,
1884; Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1887; Stine, 1890; Unwiederbringlich, 1891)
he shows love in conflict with the conventions of a society where belief in
the moral law on which they were founded is beginning to decline. What
is left is ironical acceptance and the dignity even of undeserved suffering.
It is this, rather than the actual nature of passion, which concerns Fontane,
and which distinguishes his best novel, Effi Briest (1895), from its greater
rivals on the same theme, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina. That it has not enjoyed their degree of international fame may
be due partly to the importance of its stylistic virtues which do not easily
survive translation. For a realist Fontane is astonishingly discreet and
indirect; many of what might be supposed extremely relevant facts and
feelings in a love story seem to receive too little attention, while ap-
parently incidental details and, above all, conversations are rendered skil-
fully and at length. The explanation lies in a kind of artistic tact, which
suggests to Fontane that certain things are not meant to be brought to the
conscious attention of language. He has, in fact, for a novelist, a perhaps
overdeveloped sense that not all aspects of life may legitimately be made
articulate. Hence his predilection for dialogue, which it is always fitting
to record, and his interest, at the opposite extreme, in little symbolic
details of scene which can be left to speak for themselves. The mood of
gentle irony in Fontane’s novels stems from the contrast between what his
characters are capable of saying and all that, by the merest hints, they are
shown to experience and feel.
Any less ironical or less talented acceptance of the noble conventions of
‘literature’, as opposed to the untractable reality of ‘life’, easily deterio-
rates into the kind of literary productions which were the real favourites
of the German-speaking public during the period. It is possible that Marie
von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916), in whose work the desire for a finer
world expresses itself with natural nobility and the authority of the bom
educator, will continue to command respect ; but few readers will now take
seriously the massive celebrations of the teutonic past in Felix Dahn’s and
Julius Wolff’s novels, Ernest von Wildenbruch’s epic attempts at recon-
ciling the aggressive virtues of modern Prussia with the classical ideal of
Humanitat, or Paul Heyse’s ‘stylistically pure’ heroics of love. At the
bottom, but best-selling, end of the scale come Marlitt’s sentimental
visions of class distinction overcome in the embraces of young aristocrats
and daughters of the middle classes. This was the ‘state of German
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literature’ against which a naturalist movement, having its headquarters
in Berlin and Munich, reacted with doctrines learned from Zola and
Ibsen.
Although it ventured into every genre of literature, naturalism had a
decisive effect in Germany only upon the drama, reinvigorating it with
revolutionary gusto, and drawing large audiences to club theatres (such as
the celebrated 4 Freie Buhne ’ in Berlin) which were sheltered from censor-
ship and yet enjoyed the noisiest publicity. It fostered a generation of
ingenious stage-producers, whose art exploited new opportunities for
working on the imagination, left vacant by the absence of poetry; Otto
Brahm and, later, Max Reinhardt were outstanding representatives of
this class of artistic entrepreneurs, who only now came into their own.
There also grew up a style of ‘naturalistic’ acting, the remarkable accom-
plishments of which rendered many good actors incapable of ever again
mastering the gestures and rhythms of classical drama, but prepared them
for the demands that were soon to be made upon them by the cinema.
This kind of performance had already been encouraged to some extent in
the plays of the Austrian dramatist Ludwig Anzengruber (1839-89), which
were written in peasant idiom and further pretended to frank realism by
their themes, their earthy wisdom and coarse humour. Moreover, when
the naturalist fashion was at its height, other minor, but technically com-
petent, playwrights like Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928) and Max Halbe
(1865-1944), who were not closely associated with the movement, profited
from the established taste for the world of the Petty Assizes, as well as
from the naturalist technique of acting.
Except for Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) the movement is more
famous than its members: Heinrich Hart (1855-1906) and his brother
Julius (1857-1930), editors of Kritische Waffengdnge; M. G. Conrad
(1846-1927), editor of Die Gesellschaff, Arno Holz (1863-1929) and
Johannes Schlaf (1862-1941), joint authors of Papa Hamlet (1889) and
Die Familie Selicke (1890). Their literary ambition now seems in many
ways paradoxical : to show man as the victim of environment and heredity,
and yet to believe in optimistic ideals of social progress; to unearth the
cruder details of human nature with the apparent assurance that this
grisly spectacle must liberate and exalt the mind as though in contempla-
tion of a magnificent truth; to arrange cunning and daring ‘naturalistic’
effects on the stage and yet to justify these artistic refinements by claiming
that they were the ‘real thing’. Fontane, admiring the works of the young
Gerhart Hauptmann for an achievement which he himself could not emu-
late, points out that ‘what seems to the layman a mere recording of fife
represents a degree of sheer artistry which can scarcely be surpassed’.
Such high praise would certainly be excessive with regard to the other
German naturalists ; their molestations of the tragic muse with indelicate
banalities is likely to remain no more than a sensational experiment.
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While they amused or ‘interestingly’ scandalised their audiences by trying
to accustom them to the aesthetic enjoyment of what Hermann Conradi,
one of the most eloquent spokesmen of the school, called the true emana-
tion of the world : the aroma of uncleanliness, Gerhart Hauptmann suc-
ceeded in creating moments of pure and deeply moving tragedy out of the
rawest material. This is true above all of Die Weber (1892), a play that has
no hero and hardly a plot, and yet invades the mind with pity and terror,
and persuades through its meticulous thematic coherence. Its one pro-
tagonist is a village of Silesian weavers, wretched and exploited creatures
who are barely articulate, but who convey in their native dialect the pathos
of human misery. If Hauptmann’s tumultuously successful first play, Vor
Sonnenaufgang (1889), was still marred by the rhetoric of ideological con-
victions, prophecies of the ‘dawn of a new age’, and too blatant rattling
of such fashionable skeletons in the cupboard as hereditary alcoholism,
Die Weber has no message. Society here is not the large abstraction of the
social reformer, but a real and ineradicable pattern of human greed,
suffering, unreasoning hope and insensible self-deception. The proclama-
tions of a young rebel are not more affirmed than the Christian resignation
of an old man, and even the small-town tycoon is as much a victim as a
villain. Such is the poetic justice by which Hauptmann, in a series of
naturalist plays, including masterpieces like Fuhrmann Henschel ( 1 898) and
Rose Bernd (1903), bestows the dignity of character and fate upon figures
who are small if measured by the traditional standards of tragedy.
That Hauptmann’s imagination was not bound to any programme is
further demonstrated by his mixture of poetry and prose in Hanneles
Himmelfahrt (1893). The subject and setting of this short drama could not
be more ‘ naturalistic ’ : the last hours in a poor-house of an innocent little
girl who has been driven to suicide by the brutalities of a drunkard foster-
father; yet Hauptmann’s feelings are stirred to genuine lyricism, which
finally dominates the drama in a poetic vision of ministering angels.
Though he grafts the poetic on to the real by that most dubious of devices,
a hallucinatory transformation of ordinary characters into spiritual beings,
he avoids the obvious dangers of sentimentality by sheer effectiveness of
language. Hauptmann experimented at greater length, if less successfully,
with poetic drama in Die versunkene Glocfce (1896), a composition in
which light and darkness, spiritual freedom and demonic bondage, fight
their ancient battles through somewhat confused and confusing symbolic
representatives. His later career as a dramatist is characterised by varia-
tions between naturalistic and traditionally poetic subjects.
Just as German naturalism was influenced by its French counterpart, so
the symbolist poetry of Stefan George (1868-1933) was indebted to
Mallarme and Baudelaire. The closed circle of poets who contributed to
George’s Die Blatter fur die Kunst (1892-1919: a German Yellow Book in
which the high earnestness of initiates takes the place of dandy exclusive-
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ness) also believed that ‘the worth of a poem is determined not by the
meaning. . .but by the form’. Yet their aestheticism differed from the
French in having about it the air of some militant, quasi-religious cult, of
which George was the high priest. Thus, he and his disciples further
believed that to preserve and serve the ‘pure spirit’ of poetry, called for an
elite of wise, disciplined men, who should be strong enough in soul not
only to resist the corruption of the age — its materialism, its spiritual lazi-
ness, its sentimentality — but actually to regenerate the nation. Inevitably,
perhaps, George’s tendency to assume the role of prophet, together with
his insistence on leadership and loyalty, have been misinterpreted as
betraying fascist yearnings, but he is guilty, if at all, only of not realising
that the impulse towards ‘regeneration’, which he sought to arouse,
might be capable of crude political exploitation. The cultural longing
expressed in his poetry is not for any modem country rejoicing in nation-
alistic arrays of power, but rather for that idealised state of Hellenic
perfection of which the German poetic imagination has dreamt in so
many forms. The disturbing difference in George’s case lies in a change of
tone from the traditional harmonies of classical serenity to the aggres-
sively superior accents of Nietzsche’s superman. The prophetic note is
not, however, typical of all, or even the best, of George’s work. Though
his poems form a sequence which devotees revere as a kind of spiritual
pilgrimage — beginning with the early Hymnen (1890) and Pilgerfahrten
(1891), then travelling through the various domains of art (Arcadian,
medieval, oriental, Renaissance : Algabal, 1892; Die Bucher der Hirten und
Preisgedichte, etc., 1895) and exploring the seasonal moods of the soul
( Das Jahr der Seele, 1897) in order to arrive at last at the revelations con-
tained in Der Teppich des Lebens (1899) and a number of later volumes —
they are all short lyrical pieces, and the finest stand alone as independent
masterpieces without regard to their pretentious context. To give an idea
of George by reference to some near English contemporaries, it might be
said that certain of his doctrines (such as the ‘synthesis of mind, soul and
body’) are as vague and dated as those of Meredith, which they some-
times resemble; that his fads about printing suggest the craft-revivalism of
William Morris; but that his vivid use of symbolism and his determina-
tion to avoid the cliches of conventional sentiment or expression rank him
with Yeats.
The measure of George’s achievement is more easily taken in Germany
by a glance at the work of his minor rivals, Detlev von Liliencron (1844-
1909), Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), or Max Dauthendey (1867-1918).
Their problem is manifestly that of late-comers in a tradition, who struggle
for originality in a language ringing with unwanted echoes. Dehmel’s
typographical devices, meaningless syllables, ingenious images and forced
reflections reveal only a more self-conscious awareness of the dilemma
than the ‘impressionism’ of Liliencron and Dauthendey, which pretends
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to capture a new freshness direct from things by a studied technique of
detailed touches and glimpses. Against this background, where striking or
felicitous phrases abound but great poems are rare, George’s style stands
out with firm distinction: a pattern imposed, it is felt, upon words by the
same authoritative mind, and shaped by the same assertive will as in-
spired his lifelong crusade against decadence and his search for a high,
godlike standard to affirm.
A more telling contrast is provided, however, by the poetry of Hugo
von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). The author in later years of libretti for
the operas of Richard Strauss, he had displayed by the age of twenty-five
a lyrical genius of the first order in a brief collection of poems, to which he
never again added and which therefore properly belong to the period
(unlike the work of Germany’s greatest modem poet, Rainer Maria
Rilke (1875-1926), who had accomplished nothing to warrant any similar,
sudden rise to fame during the late 1 890’s). The correspondence between
George and this young Viennese aristocrat reveals a striking antithesis of
artistic temperament, despite their concern over common problems and
occasional agreement in theory. Hofmannsthal’s nature seems by com-
parison altogether passive, almost feminine, and although he too is a
symbolist, the pure discipline of art is for him the very reverse of a
discipline of character; it is as if his imagination were adrift along an
endless shore, where he feels drawn to each thing as it passes, but never
sets foot. From the first his inspiration is deeply associated with a sense of
disintegration, which culminates in the famous ‘Letter’ (Ein Brief, 1902)
explaining, through the fictitious character of Lord Chandos, why he has
given up writing poetry. He describes a state of mind in which conven-
tional ideas and ways of thinking, indeed the conventional medium of
language, appear suddenly devoid of coherence and meaning: leaving the
poet with odd bits and pieces of the world that fascinate his attention as
though they contained, despite their inarticulate and fragmentary irrele-
vance, all the vanished meaning of the whole. This is one of the most
illuminating commentaries on the mysterious origin and significance of
much contemporary symbolism; and it complements a theme repeated
and varied in several of Hofmannsthal’s poems and short dramatic pieces
{Der Tor und der Tod, 1893; Das Bergwerk zu Falun, 1899): that the
pursuit of poetry in this subtle modem form, for all that it may create the
illusion of infinite possibilities and profundities of imaginative vision,
loses touch with the simple reality of life. The charm of Hofmannsthal’s
early work lies in his feeling for what has been lost, which inspires its
incomparable lyric strain compounded of melancholy resignation and
some deep fear half dissolved in sadness.
The many bewildering voices of the period are dominated at last by one
who speaks with true authority, having the power to resolve its sophisti-
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cated problems into dramas which touch again the perennial springs of
human motive and reveal the unalterable shape of man's predicament : it
is the Norwegian poet and playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). If he is
the ‘father of the modern theatre’, he has begotten no equals. His plays
were variously hailed or denounced throughout Europe as revolutionary
manifestos, which seemed to make him the ally, if not the founder, of
progressive movements for literary or social reform. His name has
already been mentioned in connection with naturalism, but he might with
equal justification be regarded as a symbolist, or simply as the latest and
most gifted writer of ‘ bourgeois tragedy ’. For he does not, even in Ghosts
(1881), his play involving hereditary disease, merely exploit the sensational
horrors which naturalists pretended to consider the sole reality. What is
above all real to Ibsen is the salvation of souls, the conflict of good and
evil on the psychological, not the material plane. To read A Doll's House
(1879) merely as a plea for feminine emancipation is to ignore the indica-
tions of an inescapably tragic dilemma in its love story. If there is any
reform which Ibsen thinks necessary, it must take place within the indi-
vidual, engaging him in that ancient struggle through which he comes to
terms with his destiny; this may indeed have tragic necessity, but no
solution.
It has been sufficiently illustrated how uncertain and problematical was
the literary character of the age. This is no mere matter of historical
generalisation, but reflects a real predicament in the lives of so many
individuals. Enjoying unprecedented freedom and knowledge, the con-
temporary mind is so various that it is in danger of no longer knowing
what it really wants or is. Only this problem of establishing for itself a
character might possibly be considered still truly ‘universal’, and in con-
centrating upon it in the lives of his heroes, Ibsen gave to his work that
broadly representative quality, superior to questions of school, which
distinguishes the greatest authors. The theme is most beautifully stated in
Peer Gynt (1867) a masterpiece acknowledged internationally despite the
damage done to its poetry by translation. Its hero is the usually comic
figure of the braggart, and he comes to typify something in the nature of
all mankind as surely as Don Quixote or Falstaff. What is he really? Has
he done, has he been, anything worthy the name of man? It is not neces-
sarily evidence of real goodness that is needed for his justification ; real
badness would do as well : only to have a moral character, a soul worth
saving or damning, this is for Ibsen the crucial issue. For the danger is not
evil, but nothingness, a state of humanity so pointless that it deserves
merely to be thrown back into the melting-pot, obliterated without trace.
Is this not the deepest worry of the present day — and intimately connected
with its proudest boasts? Ibsen insists that it is a matter of spiritual
integrity, which must be preserved against sheer dissipation not only of
the flesh, but of the imagination and the mind; while the ultimate enemy
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is a mysterious force which thwarts the soul in its sporadic efforts at self-
assertion, and makes it lose its substance in the toils of circumstance.
Salvation comes, if at all, through the tragic suffering of love.
The need, amounting to a driving passion, to be a ‘real’ person pro-
vides the central idea for two of Ibsen’s finest plays, Hedda G abler (1890)
and John Gabriel Borkman (1896); and his entire work explores different
aspects of the same struggle of the individual for self-realisation. The
centres of conflict he where the modern world has chiefly tried to satisfy
its urge for meaning: in its desire to get at some ‘real truth’ which it sus-
pects must lurk behind the comfortable conventions of the past; in its
curiosity, therefore, about the hidden psychology of sex; and in its
absolute claims for art. The ‘ revolutionary ’ plays, Pillars of Society (1877)
and An Enemy of the People (1882), do not depend for their interest on the
selected examples of social hypocrisy and corruption; their underlying
concern is with the tragic conflict encountered by an idealistic passion for
truth. The conflict would be merely melodramatic were it just a stand-up
fight against falsehood; in fact, it is an inner test of character and en-
tangled with personal affections and loyalties. This theme finds its final
and best expression in The Wild Duck (1884), where Gregor Werle’s
ruthless insistence upon living in full knowledge of the truth is partly
motivated by a deep resentment against his father, and causes nothing
but havoc in the fives of his friends whose existence is inseparable from
cherished illusions, affectionate complicity and innocent love.
Another version of the theme preoccupied Ibsen from Brand (1866) to
the later ‘symbolic’ dramas. The Master Builder (1892) and When We
Dead Awaken (1899). Here it is the artist’s need to be true to his inspira-
tion, and to five up to almost inhuman demands upon his integrity, which
is put to the test. Ibsen’s insight reaches farthest (and borders at times on
obscurity) in his effort to understand the ambiguous nature of the artistic
character. It aspires to the highest standards yet its motives are question-
able; its glory draws near to vainglory, to a glorification of the mind at
the expense of love; and when it is tempted into the service of fife, it
ceases to be true to itself. Ibsen reveals the inevitable paradox of art in a
period in which there is no basis in reality for its ideals, and truth no
longer conforms to instinctive feelings and beliefs. Then idealism is bound
to be charged with heroic perversity, and only a miraculous hope can
sustain it from collapse. Ibsen possessed this hope, although it is rarely
more than hinted at or expressed indirectly by symbols and metaphors.
The hint is always the same : that through suffering, and above all through
love, with its ineradicable moral roots in guilt and sacrifice ( Rosmersholm ,
1886; Little Eyolf 1894), the soul will be ‘awakened’.
How great is the difference made by this metaphorical hint may be seen
from the plays of Ibsen’s younger Swedish contemporary, August Strind-
berg (1849-1912). His characters are irretrievably in hell, which is
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‘ described with a realism that seems to preclude all thought of metaphors,
poetical or otherwise’. So it appears, in The Dance of Death (1901), to a
newcomer to the infernal scene, which, as always in Strindberg’s earlier
dramas, imprisons within its narrow circle a human couple condemned to
mutual destruction. As the play progresses he will learn more about this
hell which is the apparent denial of all that has ever been meant by poetry.
Here everything is ‘translated’, as it is called, into evil. The secret of this
translation is, in fact, a perversion of man’s most creative gift : the power
to ‘carry over’ the things of real experience into a world of spiritual
meaning. The power has become satanic because it is now used to destroy,
to undermine the pretences of the soul with some demonic interpretation
of savage purpose or malign significance. Before this psychology of the
jungle, where soul preys upon soul, luring its victim with promises, lulling
it with sentiment, nothing is holy. The external action in Strindberg’s
plays is of secondary importance, resembling so many sham manoeuvres
which precede the kill; and once the illusions upon which life depends
have been broken, the death-blow need hardly be delivered. Thus,
Creditors (1889) presents what must surely be the most accomplished dis-
play of slow spiritual torture in literature. A similar, though cruder,
technique is used in The Father (1887) where defeat is acknowledged with
the words: ‘A fatal reality would have called forth resistance, nerved life
and soul to action; but now my thoughts dissolve into air, and my brain
grinds a void until it is on fire. ’
There is no escape for Strindberg’s men and women, who are ‘bound
together by guilt and crime '(The Ghost Sonata, 1907); yet neither is there
any conventional poetic justice in their doom, as There are Crimes and
Crimes (1899) ironically demonstrates with its story of a young dramatist
who believes ‘it is quite simple to figure out a fourth act once you have
three known ones to start from ’. Driven by past misdeeds to a desperate
choice between suicide and religious expiation, the last act finds his con-
science happy enough again because of an unexpected theatrical success.
The inconsequence does not have the reassuring form of comedy, but
rather calls into question, like so much else in Strindberg’s dramatic
technique, the very conventions upon which traditional drama has been
founded. The integrity of character and moral coherence of plot, for which
Ibsen had striven, disintegrate into something like a nightmare vision of
existence, where subjective delusions are inextricable from objective fact;
and from this state there is no awakening, because the mind is cut off from
any external standard, any background of reliable truth, against which
experience might, even metaphorically, be judged. Thus, Strindberg’s
‘naturalist’ style develops into the ‘symbolist’ manner of his later dream
plays with no more than a change of emphasis. He goes beyond the
limits of either school and reaches a point where the assumption, which
they had developed to an extreme of difference, that there are entirely
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separate spheres of reality and consciousness, begins to dissolve. His
affinities are less with Zola or Maeterlinck than with the Expressionist
drama of the next century.
In one of Strindberg’s most famous plays, Miss Julia (1888), the highly
strung, almost neurotic daughter of a land-owning family succumbs to the
valet, whose cruder and stronger nature is not weakened by any ‘life-
endangering superstitions about honour’. The perception that refinement
of mind and manners may be helplessly decadent in the struggle for life
appears frequently in the literature of the period; it was felt with parti-
cular keenness in Russia, where the upper classes were seen to have lost all
contact with the plain concerns and energies of the people. Anton
Chekhov (1860-1904) in his last and finest play. The Cherry Orchard
(1904), also depicts a ruthless servant, the insensitive self-made man of the
future, who supplants a landed family grown incapable of managing its
affairs; and he might have endorsed Strindberg’s view that ‘for happiness
strong and sound races are required’. Occasionally in his stories and
plays speeches are made that look forward to a brighter and better condi-
tion of humanity, yet no critic has ever been sure to what extent Chekhov
himself believed in it. He was a doctor and a liberal, prepared to journey
to Sakhalin to report on prison conditions, and moved to genuine com-
passion by suffering; but he was also an artist of his time, as detached and
ironical in his psychological observation as Maupassant. It is scarcely
possible to decide even whether The Cherry Orchard is intended as a
comedy or a tragedy, and similar doubts exist over the other plays : The
Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), and The Three Sisters (1901). Chek-
hov is saved from Strindberg’s exaggerations by innate sympathy and
humour, but his characters are no less disastrously isolated from one
another, no less victims of a situation which they are powerless to control;
in fact, none of the traditional forms of drama remains intact. Dialogue,
for instance, seems often composed of disconnected remarks, and what
takes place resembles rather a sequence of moods and minor episodes than
a plot.
Nothing is more easily ruined on the stage; yet Chekhov was fortunate
in finding in Stanislavsky, the great producer of the Moscow Art Theatre,
an interpreter able to sense and exploit the undercurrent of emotion in
each modest phrase, the ‘atmospheric’ changes which mark the develop-
ment of a scene. For his art depends on a contrast between commonplace
appearances, what people actually do and say or seem to be, and some
deeper meaning. It is an old contrast and has surely been known to every
philosopher and artist in some form ; what is remarkable in Chekhov is his
sense that the meaning is of a kind which cannot truthfully be rendered by
building up a conventional plot and assigning roles and characters and con-
secutive speeches. This would be to give life a coherence which it does not
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really possess — except, of course, in philosophy, or in art. Chekhov was
acutely conscious of the familiar paradox, which seems to limit a writer,
determined to be faithful to ‘ what really is ’, to an ironical attitude towards
everything. This irony haunts the philosophisings that are so dear to his
characters both in the plays and many of the short stories, but it never
deteriorates into cynicism ; it gently touches upon the personal frailty in
their thoughts, catches the note of pathos in their memories and hopes,
and sets into grave relief their eccentricities, their follies and their cruelties.
Chekhov well understands the limitation of such an attitude; when his
moral conscience asks for a less aesthetic, a plainer meaning, then he must
reply like the famous scholar of A Dreary Story (1889) that he does not
know — though he does know that the ‘condition’ of human happiness
necessitates an answer. For ‘if a man has not within himself something
which is stronger and greater than all external circumstances, then a bad
cold will be enough to upset his peace of mind, and all his pessimism and
his optimism, his big and his little thoughts, have no other significance
than as symptoms ’. This knowledge makes Chekhov the most restrained
and sympathetic of the naturalist writers ; and although he is a master at
detecting details symptomatic of a decadent society, he does not insist on
any aggressive naturalistic philosophy. His diagnosis can be as grimly
disturbing as anything by Zola or Strindberg ( Ward No. 6 (1 892)), but it is
softened by real humanity, because he sees that his art does not reveal the
truth, only at best the sad awareness of its lack.
To make literature give an answer, to render truths which have a moral
meaning, this was the major concern of Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
during the last thirty years of his life. By the end of the century he was
venerated as no man of letters had been since Goethe; ‘pilgrims’ from all
over Europe went to Yasnaya Polyana to see the novelist-prophet who
dressed like a peasant in the blouse which is now called a ‘tolstovka’; and
though it was a police offence to be in possession of certain of his
pamphlets denouncing the iniquities of the regime, the government no
longer dared to interfere with their world-famous author. His fame now
largely rests upon War and Peace (1869) 1 and Anna Karenina (1877),
although he himself felt compelled to repudiate them after the spiritual
crisis which he has recorded in My Confession (1879), one of the most
intense and moving autobiographical documents ever written and a
turning-point in Tolstoy’s career. It was followed by a series of essays
in which he developed his unorthodox Christian views ( What I Believe ,
1883, contains the essentials), and a number of simple didactic tales like
What Men Live By (1882) and How Much Land Does a Man Need?
(1886). Although he returned to fiction again with Resurrection (1898) and
Hadji Murat (1904), wrote several short stories including the notorious
Kreutzer Sonata (1886) and the masterpiece Master and Man (1895), and
1 See vol. x, chap. vu.
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attempted satirical dramas like Fruits of Enlightenment (1889) as well as
more serious ‘problem plays’ like The Power of Darkness (1886), all his
later work is influenced by the upheaval which had taken place in his life
and thought.
Tolstoy had been interested in moral and philosophical questions from
the first, less as matters of intellectual theory than in their bearing on the
way people live. Such an early story as The Cossacks (1862) is clearly in-
spired by an idea which is the dominant theme in his writing until the end :
that a simple, a ‘natural’ way of life brings people closer to the secret of
goodness — and this invariably means for Tolstoy also the secret of happi-
ness— than all the resources of society, culture or civilisation. Both Prince
Andrew and Pierre in War and Peace are led by devious routes to aspects
of the same wisdom, and the vast scheme of the novel is held together by a
conviction that the great issues of history and heroism are an illusion
beside the real values of homely existence. The moral structure of Anna
Karenina is even plainer, where the gradual catastrophe of a romantic
passion, which consumes the souls of the ever more abandoned and
isolated lovers, is matched against the struggle of Levin and Kitty to find
their true selves, and one another, and their place in a genuine community.
Yet before Tolstoy had completed this novel the tension of moral and
religious crisis was beginning to mount; he never properly revised the
book, and in the end he renounced it. It is not altogether easy to see why,
for the actual content of his ideas underwent little change. What seems to
have been involved was the quality of Tolstoy’s belief in them, his belief
in them as a writer and as a man. He had made fiction out of moral
problems, exploited them as part, but no more than a part, of the whole
panorama of life, which he loved above all things in his imagination, ‘ both
its darkness and its light’; he had traced the psychology of spiritual
awakening and spiritual downfall, enjoyed its excitements and sorrows,
and indulged in the sublime artistic pleasure of winning resolution out of
tragedy. Yet did he really believe in the truths he told so beautifully, so
wisely? Did they make any difference to him, whose experience was that
of a writer throughout, or to the public which merely read? It was, after
all, only a work of imagination, only art.
‘What is Art?’ This question was almost drowned at first by Tolstoy’s
personal confession of faith, but it inevitably emerged again with his later
writing and was treated systematically in an essay with that title in 1 897.
This has shocked by its radical judgements, and was obviously out of
keeping with the ‘aesthetic’ views of the time, although it tries to avoid
the narrow argument over didacticism by considering generally with what
kind of sympathies and emotions a work ‘infects’ the reader. Can the
imagination dwell safely upon the adventures of evil — with all their
colourful detail and fascinating psychology — even if ostensibly they are
condemned? For if they are well written they must surely capture its
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interest. Tolstoy so formulates the problem that even Shakespeare is
rejected, while the biblical story of Joseph remains as a model. It is a
difficult distinction, yet more telling than is usually allowed by critics
outraged by more obviously unacceptable examples. Admittedly, the
essay makes sense only against the background of Tolstoy’s religious con-
victions; but from their extreme standpoint it is possible to see that there
may be something morally questionable about the glorification of vanity
and error. There have been Puritanical objections to art in the past, though
not as a rule from artists. Had Tolstoy simply struggled to put aside the
unrealities of literature for the realities about which he wrote, his story
would have had the admirable simplicity which he admired; but he did
not. He struggled to ‘convert’ his imagination and his art, and he was
never a more scrupulous stylist than when he was writing his Confession.
Biographers have given many hints that Tolstoy never found the inner
serenity which he preached, and have noted occasionally self-destructive
elements in his attacks on social evils. These continued to provide him
with his subjects and his satisfactions (at the time of writing Resurrection
he remarks a return of the creative exhilaration of War and Peace), yet also
with doubts that had to be overcome. Notes of a Madman (1881) gives a
striking account of the fear of death which was so profoundly connected
with his religious crisis and with his obsessive vision of evil devouring
every aspect of contemporary life. The Kreutzer Sonata or The Devil
(1889) are as fearful in their exposure of marriage as anything by Strind-
berg, though they differ by their claim to moral, not merely psychological,
significance. Tolstoy’s absolute condemnation of civilised society, his
intolerance of everything which fell short of his particular ideal, turned
even Chekhov against him, who could not accept these damning philo-
sophies that pretended to offer salvation. Now that the myth of Tolstoy
the prophet has passed, it is less easy to perceive his pride, the hubris of
his genius, which suggested to him that he could and must save the world.
Evil may be overcome by saints, but can it be overcome by writers?
The sentence: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’, is
written above the first chapter of Anna Karenina, which begins with the
words: ‘Every happy family is happy in the same way; every unhappy
family is unhappy after its own fashion.’ Together they contain Tolstoy’s
dilemma in a nutshell. There can be no great literature without the story
of man’s wandering, without his fall; but equally there can be no fall
without an order of good and evil which is immutably in the hands of
God. Tolstoy was deeply troubled by an inability, typical of the age, to be
convinced by the orthodox assurance of final redemption and rectification.
The biblical quotation may have been intended only as a rebuke to bigots
eager to rejoice at the doom of an adulteress; but the truth it contains began
to appear to him later as a shelving of moral responsibility. The evil
might be left to the hereafter, but what of the injustice, the misery, the
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wrong-living here and now? As a writer he needed the unhappiness, but
there came a moment when he could not bear it; it had to be condemned,
it had to be overcome and put right. And so the struggle with himself and
with the wicked world ensued, from which have emerged such victorious
endings as are portrayed in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Master and
Man and Resurrection. The irony of Tolstoy’s dilemma is reflected in the
criticism levelled above all at the last novel, that it is spoiled by its
insistence on a solution ; and if it is redeemed then it is, after all, by the
imaginative sympathy which it shows for weakness and suffering. The
proclamation of a state of happiness, designed to rectify moral iniquity
and the burden of immemorial guilt, does not make for great literature;
and if it is not realised in saintliness, it can only make for revolution.
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CHAPTER VI
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
I t is the fault of most writing on the history of art in the nineteenth
century that art and architecture are kept separate. Admittedly, it is
not easy to see a unity of style between Scott’s St Pancras of 1868 and
Monet’s St Lazare of 1877. Moreover, one is discouraged from any
efforts at formulating such a unity by the crashing drop in aesthetic quality
directly one moves from the most familiar works of painting to the most
familiar works of architecture. No one can deny the truth of this value
judgement, but there is also a fallacy involved. One tends to forget
official painting and non-official architecture, the one as bad as any
insurance company headquarters, the other not as good, but occasionally
nearly as good, as Monet and Seurat. If one is aware of the whole evi-
dence, a treatment can be attempted doing justice to all its aspects. The
only difficulty which remains is that the layman — and in this respect
nearly everybody is a layman — knows much about the Impressionists and
Post-Impressionists, but near to nothing about Philip Webb and Norman
Shaw, H. H. Richardson and Stanford White, and indeed Antoni Gaudi.
This is one reason why painting is taken first in this chapter. Another is
that the nineteenth century was indeed a century of the dominance of
painting, aesthetically as well as socially. The dominance had been estab-
lished before the year 1870. Socially speaking the patron of 1870 was no
longer the patron of 1770. About 1770 the social situation of art had still
been that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque. The
Church, the courts, the nobility were the patrons, even if the occasional
merchant, banker, brewer ought not to be discounted. Patrons were on
the whole men of leisure, and their education had included some apprecia-
tion of architecture, craftsmanship and the fine arts. A hundred years
later architects built hundreds of churches for mean suburbs ; speculators,
in the absence of architects sufficiently interested, built so as to make these
vast new suburbs mean ; the nobility had receded or was receding, and the
new commercial and industrial class of patrons had neither had the chance
of an introduction to matters aesthetic nor the leisure to master them later
in life. That determined their attitude not only to the buildings for which
they paid but also to the painting they chose for their houses. But while
an architect cannot build without a patron, a painter, if he is prepared to
starve, can paint without one. The starving painter appears first in the
history of art in Holland in the seventeenth century — that is, in the first
middle-class republic. He becomes the prototype of the worth-while
painter in the nineteenth century. Millet sold six drawings for a pair of
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shoes. Renoir in 1869 wrote: ‘We don’t eat every day’ and Monet in the
same year: ‘Here I am, at a halt, for lack of paints.’ Painters ready to
live in this way can wait for the rare patron to turn up who understands
them. So the most convinced of the painters could keep up an aesthetic
integrity and an enthusiasm for exploration which architects had no hope
of matching.
Impressionism is usually seen as starting with Edouard Manet (1 832-83)
and such paintings as his Dejeuner sur Vherbe and Olympia of 1863. But
they qualify only with reservations. What shocked critics and the public in
them was more a matter of subject than of treatment. Men in their normal
clothes out for a picnic and a naked girl with them, or a young woman
posing in the Titian tradition but appearing not so much as a nude than as
stripped — Courbet had done as much and worse. Worse in that he,
demonstrative and obtrusive realist that he was, wanted his nudes to
be suggestive, while Manet’s were especially irritating because without
doubt painted with full aesthetic detachment. Courbet in fact was
shocked by Olympia too, but for its lack of realism. He called her a
playing-card, and here something new was indeed involved. If she looks
flat, it is because strong light is focused direct on her, eliminating the
nuances of undulating surfaces. Velasquez had done likewise in the
seventeenth century, but no one else, and it is understandable that Manet
called Velasquez ‘the painter of painters’, when he visited Spain in 1865.
This interest in direct sunlight and its effect on bodies became one of the
chief concerns of the Impressionists. Another — less novel but equally im-
portant — is that of contemporary, everyday subject-matter. A third
comes out in Manet’s Concert in the Tuileries Gardens of 1862: the prob-
lem of painting a crowd convincingly by letting the frame cut arbitrarily
into the composition and even more by rapid, forceful, sketchy brush-
work, indicating movement of figures by movement of the brush.
Manet was attacked violently. Rossetti called his (and Courbet’s) art
‘putrescence’, Jules Claretie ‘jokes or parodies’. And so the best of the
young began to rally round him. They were Edgar Degas (1834-1917),
Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Auguste Renoir (1840-1919). If Camille
Pissarro (1830-1903) and Alfred Sisley (1839-99) are added to these, the
principal Impressionists have been named. The word was coined some-
what later; but impression had been used occasionally to convey the
intention of landscape painters even of the School of Barbizon and their
contemporaries, that is, painters bora before 1820. One critic said of
Jongkind that ‘everything with him lies in the impression’, another called
Daubigny in 1865 ‘chief of the school of the impression’. Of the five men
just referred to, who were all bom between 1830 and 1840, three were
indeed landscape painters, and Renoir was at least partly a landscape
painter. Only Degas kept to the figure. All had been impressed by Manet
(and by Courbet), but in one way they soon went beyond him and in their
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turn influenced him. In 1869 both Monet and Renoir painted the
Grenouillere near Bougival on the Seine, and these were open-air pictures,
in the sense that the momentary, rapidly passing effects of sunlight on
foliage and rippled water were caught directly and not filtered through
studio adjustments. Plein air painting became one of the cornerstones of
Impressionism. The others are the ‘impression’, that is the rendering of
what meets the eye as it meets the eye, the translation of movement on to
the still plane of the canvas, and the everyday subject, whether landscape
or still-life or portrait or genre, the latter in the sense of rendering con-
temporary events of no significance beyond their just taking place. It is
true that Manet in 1864 painted the battle between the Kearsarge and the
Alabama, an episode in the American Civil War which had taken place off
the French coast, and in 1867 the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico before
the firing squad; but they are exceptions in his oeuvre, and in any case, just
like the Olympia, not yet fully Impressionist. Degas was the master of the
everyday occurrence. Vicomte Lepic and his little daughters out for a walk
in the Place de la Concorde (c. 1873) — they are in the foreground and the
frame cuts off their legs. Another gentleman appears on the left, but we
see only half of him because the frame cuts him vertically. The houses
and trees around the square are only lightly sketched in. There is hardly
anything else. Yet this is eventful compared with Degas’ Repasseuses busy
ironing or stretching their limbs and yawning, his girls washing their bodies
in a tub, observed in such unselfconscious and hence such alluringly grace-
less movements, ‘as if you looked through a keyhole ’ (so he said himself),
and his innumerable Ballet Dancers rehearsing or performing — all, in spite
of their accidental looking poses, composed on the canvas with wit and an
exquisite taste sharpened by a study of Japanese woodcuts.
Japonisme had begun in the 1850’s and gathered momentum from the
time of the International Exhibition in London in 1862. It means different
things to different people — to Manet, who placed a Japanese woodcut
behind Zola in his portrait of 1868, shadowless clear and light colours; to
Degas a piquant asymmetrical arrangement of figures; to Whistler, to
Gauguin, to van Gogh qualities we shall have to examine later.
In the five years after 1869 the group, now all men of round about
thirty-five, consolidated itself, and in 1874 a first exhibition was held,
necessary because the official Salon kept its doors closed to most of their
works. In the exhibition there was Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines with
the crowd boldly brushed in as patterns of vertical strokes, the trees as a
hazy mass, except for the branches of those closest to us, and the houses
again only indicated through the cold mist. The distance is a sea of greys
and blues into which the street merges. Renoir had La Loge, that brilliant
portrait of a couple in a theatre box, a test example of how the Impres-
sionist focuses on the central motif, in this case the face of the young
woman, and turns more and more sketchy the further he moves away
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from the centre. The colours are black and white — early-Renoir colours —
with his unmistakable roses and greyish pinks in the background. Renoir
also showed his exquisite young Ballet Dancer, the tulle of the dress the
airiest greyish white with just a touch of light blue in the ribbons, brown
hair and a piquant black bracelet. The background is here also left
entirely without definition. There were ten Degas, five Pissarros and five
Sisleys. Among Monet’s five, incidentally, one was called ‘Impression,
sunrise’, and from that title Charivari took the idea of discussing the whole
group as Impressionists. This gave them their name for good.
The public and the press still remained hostile for a long time. Figaro
playfully called their second exhibition, held at Durand Ruel’s in the
rue le Peletier, off the Boulevard des Italiens, a disaster second in magni-
tude only to the recent fire at the Opera. But allies began to appear. Zola
had written in their favour already in 1866, prophesying a place in the
Louvre for Manet and also praising Monet and Pissarro, and now, in
1878, Theodore Duret published his book on Les Peintres Impressionistes.
In terms of income the painters themselves, however, did not profit at
once from this change of opinion. They tried to follow their first two
exhibitions by sales of fifty to seventy pictures but did not succeed in
obtaining more than an average of about 160 francs. In 1878 another sale
took place. The average for Monet was 185 francs, for Sisley 115. It was
different when Duret had to sell his collection in 1894. Some of the major
works of Manet then fetched prices between 5000 and 11,000 francs.
Among the first consistent buyers were Americans such as Henry O.
Havemeyer.
The change from hostility to appreciation of a new style in art is always
a change of mind. In the case of the Impressionists it was also a change of
optic habits. When Ruskin called Whistler’s Cremorne Gardens ‘ flinging a
pot of paint in the public’s face ’, we may grant him that perhaps he really
could not recognise what was represented on the insulted canvas. Yet for
today’s laymen the Impressionists have become the easiest to enjoy of all
works of painting, easier by far than the Old Masters. This is not so sur-
prising; for the Impressionists were not revolutionaries although their
technique made them seem so. They stand at the end of a golden age of
painting, not at the beginning of a new age of doubtful, untried aesthetic
values. Titian in his later works, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Constable,
all are their ancestors, as all painted the impressions they received and not
images distilled into permanence from many impressions as Raphael or
Poussin or Ingres had done. It is characteristic of Impressionism that one
remembers many familiar pictures yet is unable to single out a few as
representative of all. One Monet landscape, one is tempted to say, is as
good as another, one ballet study by Degas as good as another. One has
one’s favourites, and there are of course outstanding successes and in-
different products of routine; but the skill is breathtaking throughout and
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the pleasure in all that the eye can take in never ceases to be infectious.
Camille Pissarro, a little older than the others and more of a thinker,
recommended to students when he was about sixty-five that the motif
ought to be ‘observed more for shape and colour than for drawing’, that
one ought not to the end ‘lose the first impression’, that ‘precise drawing
hampers the impression’ and that ‘perceptions must be put down im-
mediately’. Renoir, incapable of systematic thought, wrote: ‘I have no
theories. I paint for the sake of painting. ’ Monet, not a theorist either,
wrote late in life that he did not claim more than ‘ the merit of having
painted direct from nature, trying to convey my impressions in the
presence of the most fugitive effects ’. In another context he said that he
could wish ‘he had been bom blind and then suddenly regained sight so
that he could paint what he saw without knowing what the objects were’.
This fanaticism of mere seeing and rendering what had been seen forced
Monet immediately after the death of his wife to notice the various tones
of death on her face.
If death could become reduced to a visual experience, it is obvious that
Impressionists would not be interested in the intellectual values of subject
matter. No Adoration of the Shepherds for them, no Perseus and Andro-
meda, no Uncle Toby and Widow W adman, no Slave Market. The field of
the painter is infinite, but it is most strictly the visual field. The intellectual
field is closed to him. There is a limitation here which was soon to be felt.
Monet had the courage to draw the ultimate consequences. In 1891 he
exhibited fifteen pictures of the same haystack painted in different light
(and sold them at 3000 to 4000 francs each). Let no one, his argument
ran, be distracted from my artistry by irrelevant thought on the subject of
these paintings. Just look and admire the truth of my vision. Realism
thus remained valid as radically as in the days when Courbet had been
proud of being ‘sans ideal et sans religion’, as he had put it in his cruder
way, but it was now a realism evaporating into the immaterial reality of
air and light.
Impressionism in the end spread to all countries and became the
vernacular of the academies, but the spread took time. In England the
change belongs to the generation of Walter Sickert (1860-1942), in
Germany to Max Liebermann (1847-1935). Liebermann had been in
Paris in 1874, Sickert in 1883; an Italian, Giuseppe de Nittis (1846-84)
had gone even earlier, in 1867. He would have to be considered the earliest
foreign convert to Impressionism, if it were not for the Americans who
now begin to appear on the European stage not only as spectacular buyers
of paintings but as spectacular painters — and none was more spectacular
than James McN. Whistler (1834-1903), who reached Paris as early as 1855
and decided to live in London in 1 859. In the years following the Dejeuner
sur Vherbe and the Olympia and leading to the Grenouilleres he was not
therefore a member of the group which was taking shape, and if his At the
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Piano of 1859, his White Girl of 1862 and his Valparaiso Harbour of 1866
strike one as Impressionist or akin to Impressionism, the reason must lie
in Whistler’s own, unaided endeavour. The dissolution of everything solid
into a blueish-grey haze in the painting of the sea outside Valparaiso
does indeed go beyond anything then attempted by the young Parisians,
and when Whistler started to formulate his views publicly — which was
more than a decade later — a number of them were pure Impressionism.
To quote only one, he commented on a snow-scene of his with one single
black figure: ‘I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black
figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot.’
But other and more significant views of Whistler’s contradict the
doctrine of the Impressionists in a direction already indicated by such
early paintings as At the Piano, which is a composition, as self-conscious
as those that Degas worked on during these early years, that is, before he
ever turned to contemporary subjects. So while Degas was still tied to the
mythology of the art schools Whistler tried to make use of delicately calcu-
lated arrangements of people of his own day for non-academic purposes.
They culminate in his most famous portraits, those of his mother (1872)
and of Carlyle (1874). Moreover, Whistler called his landscapes not
humbly Impressions but more presumptuously Harmonies, Symphonies
or Nocturnes — Symphony in grey and green. Nocturne in grey and gold,
and so on — and with that introduced connotations of musical — that is,
abstract — relevance and of mood, and such connotations were forbidden
to the Impressionists, captives as they were in the territory of the visible.
One would not expect to find Monet or Renoir saying, as Whistler did,
that in the twilight ‘tall chimneys become campanili’, and in the night
‘the warehouses are palaces’, or that ‘painting [is] the poetry of sight, as
music is the poetry of sound ’, or more sweepingly, that ‘ Nature is usually
wrong’.
Whistler liked to shock, as did his disciple Oscar Wilde. It is easy to be
funny about Oscar Wilde’s lily and Whistler’s cane and eyeglass, in fact
about all the trappings of the fin-de-siecle aesthete and dandy, but there is
also something positive and forward-pointing in Whistler’s belief in the
supremacy of art over life. The Impressionists, as far as we can see from
photographs, had no taste in their own houses. They painted, and that is
where their relation to art ended. Whistler’s house, the White House in
Tite Street, Chelsea, designed by his friend Edward Godwin (1833-86) in
1878, was a challenge to the historicism of nineteenth-century architecture
and to the ponderous forms and sombre colours in fashion. The facade
was white, the windows and doorway were placed in piquant arbitrariness,
and the rooms inside were sparsely furnished and painted in white and
pure rich yellow. The walls in Whistler’s first one-man show had been
grey, and there had been blue and white Chinese porcelain to set off the
pictures. Whistler, in his taste in interior decoration, was no doubt guided
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by Godwin who had, as early as 1862, painted the rooms of his house at
Bristol in plain colours and decorated them with a few selected pieces of
antique furniture, some Persian rugs on bare floors and a number of
Japanese woodcuts. Whistler also was fascinated by Japanese art and
painted his Princesse du pays de la porcelaine ( Rose and Silver) as early as
1865. It formed the focal-point of the celebrated Peacock Room which he
decorated with peacocks in dark blue and gold in luxuriantly oriental
convolutions for F. R. Leyland, the Liverpool shipping magnate, in
London in 1877. In the same year Comyns Carr opened the Grosvenor
Gallery for the display of modern art, and Gilbert’s ‘ greenery-yallery,
Grosvenor Gallery’ will be understandable to readers now.
At the same time it is interesting to note that Godwin must have looked
to Japan for pure, clear colours and delicacy and sparseness of furnishing
— he designed for the furniture trade quite a number of somewhat spindly
pieces in the mid- 1870’s — and that Whistler’s admiration for Japan must
have included the same qualities but also the unfailing sense of exquisitely
dainty composition which delighted Degas at the same time.
The importance of Whistler in our present context lies in his turn from
refined realism to refined decoration, and from the gloom of Victorian
furnishing to the light colours of the post-Victorian style. In this he and
Godwin went beyond the otherwise much more influential work in the
field of the decorative arts which was done during the same years by a
greater man: William Morris (1834-96). Morris had gone to Oxford to
read divinity, but turned to architecture and then, dissatisfied with work
at the drawing-board, to painting. He studied for a while under Rossetti;
and the Pre-Raphaelites and their defender, John Ruskin, became his
heroes. From the writings of Ruskin he learned to love the art of the
Gothic Middle Ages, to respect their craftsmanship, and to develop an
ardent faith in craftsmanship as such. The art of the Pre-Raphaelites —
still young and unsullied — gave Morris in addition an equally fervent
faith in accurate and yet decorative line. Ruskin had preached craftsman-
ship on the one hand, social reform on the other. Morris united the two
and, moreover, endowed them with a burning energy, a robust aggressive-
ness and an artistic genius that had all been lacking in Ruskin. So Morris
got together with his Pre-Raphaelite friends and especially his closest
friend, the architect Philip Webb (1831-1915), and decided in 1861 to
found a firm of, as he called them, ‘Fine Art Workmen in painting,
carving, furniture, and the metals’. They designed furniture, tiles, wall-
paper, stained glass windows, in a style totally different from what was
then current. Furniture, instead of being pretentious, bulgy and in the
so-called Free or Mixed Renaissance — that is, crowded with motifs inspired
by anything from Cinquecento to Jacobean and the various Louis — was
simple, angular, and indebted to the English cottage.
Stained glass, instead of being realistic painting applied to glass,
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returned to simple flat shapes in pure, glowing colours and with the
leading between the individual quarries judiciously used. Wallpaper, in-
stead of favouring bunches of naturalistically drawn and painted flowers
or landscapes in three dimensions or both together, concentrated on
simple floral motifs, developed in two dimensions so as to demonstrate
acceptance of the surface of the wall to be covered by wallpaper, just as
Morris glass accepted the glass surface.
This return to functional fundamentals was a revolution in decoration,
and Morris’s own designs stand out from those of his age as unchallenged
as do the paintings of the Impressionists. The revolution had begun as
early as 1859, when Morris had got married and had Red House designed
for himself and his wife by Philip Webb. The house, at Bexley Heath to the
south-east of London, is unpretentious and informal, not a copy of any
one style of the past, and furnished inside with pieces in which the Morris
doctrine is already fully exposed. There is in particular one fireplace,
inscribed ‘Ars Longa, Vita Brevis ’, which is so completely independent of
history, so completely devoid of ornamental enrichment and so function-
ally designed that it must rank as the earliest defeat of historicism. It has
all the freshness and daring which Godwin’s rooms of 1862 must have
possessed, and more of these qualities than Morris’s own work of the
1870’s and 1880’s.
Yet these are the years in which, by lecturing and writing, Morris
formulated his theory of artistic and social reform and thus achieved
universal fame and made converts of artists and architects in England, on
the Continent and in America. His two points of departure were that the
art of our time must be sick, since it is only the self-expression of great
individuals, however valuable, and that architecture and design must be
sick also, since all they produce is ‘tons and tons of unutterable rubbish’
in people’s houses, and houses themselves which are ‘ simply blackguardly’
for the rich, ‘hideous hovels’ for the poor. In the Middle Ages, the small
towns had been beautiful and everything made by man had been beautiful.
Why was that so? Morris’s answer is that every artist had been a crafts-
man and every craftsman an artist. ‘Art is the expression by man of his
pleasure in labour.’ This must be recovered if art is to survive. The machine
is an enemy, industry is an enemy, the designer for industry is no more
than a ‘squinter at a sheet of paper’. Morris himself was of course a
designer, but he was also a fanatical maker.
The fact that socialism became his creed, followed, as he himself once
wrote, out of ‘the study of history and the love and practice of art’, art in
his mind never being the great individual painting, but design, that is, the
making of things useful as well as beautiful, and making them for every-
body. ‘I do not want art for a few’, he said, ‘any more than I want
education for a few or freedom for a few.’ And as he also did not believe
in inspiration but was convinced that there was a craftsman in every man,
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art in the end was both work done as ‘ a happiness to the maker and the
user’, and work done — ‘by the people, for the people’.
Morris never fully made up his mind how this return to a healthy condi-
tion of art and life might come about. Sometimes he took the radical line
of Spengler; for instance when he wrote: ‘Maybe, man may, after some
terrible cataclysm, learn to strive towards a healthy animalism, may grow
from a tolerable animal into a savage, from a savage into a barbarian, and
so on, and some thousands of years hence he may be beginning once more
those arts which we have now lost.’ At other times he took a more evolu-
tionary view and recommended that we ‘ do our best to the end of pre-
paring for the change and so softening the shock of it’. In any case he was
much too active a man to sit back and wait for his catastrophe. He
lectured, he wrote his poetry and he ran his shop, and he had also recom-
mendations for useful action to those who were not producers but con-
sumers. What he told them has remained topical to this day: fight the
smoke of factory and domestic chimneys, don’t throw away litter, don’t
fell trees before beginning to build houses and so on. And ‘don’t have
anything in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be
beautiful’. Anyone accepting this principle will find that he can (or must)
give up many things. Morris himself may be believed when he said that he
would prefer ‘living in a tent in the Persian desert or a turf-hut on the
Icelandic hill-side’ to living in the houses built today for ‘ ignorant, purse-
proud, digesting-machines’.
But there runs a flaw through the doctrine of Morris. Although he was
a fanatical craftsman, most of what he did and what made him famous —
notably his chintzes and wallpapers — were in fact only designed by him
but made in factories. Moreover, his furnishing business was not aiming
at tents and turf-huts but at the creation of very civilised, very self-
consciously contrived surroundings. So what Morris produced did often
not entail ‘pleasure in labour’, and it was certainly never ‘for the people’.
In short, his was an expensive shop. He knew this. He said once, when
asked on a job what he was doing, that he was ‘ serving the swinish luxury
of the rich’, and another time he said more elaborately that ‘all art costs
time, trouble and thought,. . .and money is only a counter to represent
these things ’.
So Morris’s was more an aesthetic than a social revolution. It is true
that he convinced a number of talented young men to turn to craft as a
job for life, and that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain in its early
days produced much honest and thoughtful and beautiful work. It is also
true that the aesthetic reform in design would not have had sufficient
impetus if, at the beginning, it had not been in the hands of makers rather
than designers for factories. Yet in the end it was the designer who
profited most, and if the twentieth century achieved at its very beginning
an original, functional style, the credit must go largely to Morris and his
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efforts to make people see that everyday products matter more than easel
pictures.
Morris was exclusively a designer in two dimensions. When it came to
furniture, Philip Webb (1831-1915) designed for the firm. Webb was in
addition one of the two most important English architects of his genera-
tion. His Red House had been the first of a large number of informal,
comfortable houses designed by a large number of architects. The whole
movement became known as the Domestic Revival — a term which of
course includes Morris’s work. Webb did not build much. He was always
honest, never modish, and could be daring in his use of materials and his
blending of motifs from widely different styles. Richard Norman Shaw
(1831-1912) had a livelier imagination and a lighter hand. His houses of
the 1870’s, mostly in Hampstead and Chelsea and for artists, are of brick,
with motifs from the Dutch and English seventeenth century elegantly and
picturesquely mixed. Queen Anne was the name given, not quite accu-
rately, to this style. Elements of it appear already in Webb’s Red House.
Ten years later its possibilities began to be seen by others. Eden Nesfield
built a lodge at Kew Gardens in Queen Anne in 1868, J. J. Stevenson the
Red House in the Bayswater Road in 1871. Norman Shaw after having
left an early partnership with Nesfield discovered it for himself in 1872. It
was he who made it the fashion for the sensitive and the ‘ artistic By 1 88 1
Gilbert could write in Patience ‘that the reign of Good Queen Anne was
Culture’s palmiest day’. Whatever the real elements of the so-called
Queen Anne, and they were the Dutch seventeenth century and the
English William and Mary styles, the result was a domestic architecture of
a refinement in full contrast to the grossness of the High Victorian
decades. It is this refinement that links Impressionism in France with the
Domestic Revival in England. Courbet’s realism had been as gross as
High Victorian architecture. Now delicacy, subtlety, the light touch,
became the ideals. Concurrently, in political and social history the un-
questioning optimism of the mid-century declined.
It is never possible to fix an exact date for the beginning of a style. Red
House is Late Victorian, not High Victorian, though it was designed
nearly five years before so High Victorian an effort as Scott’s St Pancras
Station. Late Victorian also are Morris’s designs, Godwin’s buildings and
designs and Norman Shaw’s houses. There is always a time-lag between
the first pioneer work and the consolidation of a style. The 1870’s must be
regarded as the centre-piece of the Domestic Revival, as it is the centre-
piece of Impressionism. Norman Shaw’s New Zealand Chambers, his
house, now the Royal Geographical Society, near the Albert Hall, his own
house in Ellerdale Road, Hampstead, Swan House, Chelsea — all of
1872-6 — are among the best examples, unrivalled at the time anywhere in
Europe and of infinitely greater value and historical significance than his
own late work in a Neo-English Baroque. Socially the most interesting
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job of Norman Shaw’s is the design done in 1875 for Bedford Park,
Tumham Green, London, commissioned by Comyns Carr’s brother
Jonathan Carr. This is the first of all garden suburbs and the pattern on
which — with a typical twist from catering for a cultured middle class to
catering for the working class — Port Sunlight and Boumville were de-
signed in the 1890’s. From them it was only a step to the independent
garden city, complete with its own industrial and civic buildings, and this
step was taken in theory by Ebenezer Howard in his Garden Cities of
Tomorrow, published in 1898, and finally in practice by Barry Parker and
Raymond Unwin’s Letchworth, begun in 1903.
All this had a great influence abroad. Cites jardins, or citta giardini,
began to appear in France and Italy, the Prussian government in 1896 sent
Hermann Muthesius to London for a number of years to study the
Domestic Revival, Morris was translated into many languages, Edmond de
Goncourt in 1896 called the new style of decoration by the English name
Yachting Style, the Grand Duke of Hesse commissioned English archi-
tects to design for his palace at Darmstadt, and artists began to turn
craftsmen on the Continent as they had done in England. However, the
movement remained on the intimate scale of the private house and its
furnishings. Official architecture stayed grand, just as official and highly
paid painting in all countries had remained unaffected by Impressionism.
To remember this, it is sufficient to thumb the illustrated souvenirs of the
Paris Salons or to follow the purchases of the Royal Academy in London
under the Chantrey Bequest — prices of £2000 and £3000 being paid for
the works by Millais and Lord Leighton. Edwin Long’s Babylonian
Marriage Market was bought in 1875 for £1700 and changed hands in
1881 for £6615.
Architecture outside Britain before the turn of the century had nothing
to compare with the Domestic Revival in Britain. It is Neo-Baroque un-
ashamedly, whether one goes to Rome to see the Monument to Victor
Emanuel II begun in 1884 and the Ministry of Justice begun in 1888, or to
Berlin to see the Houses of Parliament begun in 1884 and the Cathedral
begun in 1894.
Only the United States form an exception. Here at least as much of
importance took place in architecture as in Britain. For the moment only
the domestic aspects of the reform concern us — houses of the 1880’s by
Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-86) and Stanford White (1853-1906), as
freely improvising on motifs of the past as Webb and Shaw and their
partisans, and not uninfluenced by them. These American houses, like the
paintings of Whistler, mark the moment when America jumped forward
from a provincial back seat into the front row of Western art which she
was henceforth not to leave. Even in official architecture the United
States now assumed a distinction beyond other nations. McKim, Mead
and White, the firm to which Stanford White belonged, turned, again in
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the 1880’s, to an imitation Italian Renaissance (Public Library, Boston,
1888-92) and later, together with others, to a Classical Re-Revival, more
restrained and more disciplined than the Neo-Baroque of Europe (Penn-
sylvania Station, New York, 1906-10).
It is in these works of the Americans that one must look for the parallel
to that noble Classicism which, in opposition to Impressionism, appears
in France in the cool grey murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98)
and culminates in Germany in the mysterious, sombre and technically
naive paintings of Hans von Marees (1837-87). In these paintings vaguely
mythological figures, placed frontally or in profile, stand or move silently
in sacred groves. Compositions keep to the most elementary axes.
Marees, though only once in his life commissioned to execute mural
paintings, always thought in their terms. In this and everything else the
contrast to the principles of Impressionism is complete. Marees reached
his position from the traditions of classicism and not in any conscious
opposition to an Impressionism which was hardly noticed by him.
In France a comparable position was established during Marees’ last
years by Georges Seurat (1859-91). His subjects are as different from
Marees’ as can be, his colour is different, his handling of the brush is
extremely different, but faith in strict simplification and axiality connects
Seurat and Marees. Seurat was more discussed during the few years of
his maturity, that is, between 1884 and 1891, for his system of coloration
than for his composition. Yet the latter is more novel and must have been
more baffling than the former. Seurat’s was a clear logical mind and a
cool temperament. He became interested in the optical treatises of
Chevreul and others and found that if one reduced one’s palette to a
limited number of clear, bright, unmixed colours and applied them to the
canvas in dots unmixed the eye would perform the ‘optical mixture’ and
a greater truth to colour in nature would be achieved. Seurat’s scientific
technique made converts at once, Paul Signac (1863-1935) first, and then
others, some Frenchmen and almost immediately some Belgians (inclu-
ding Henri van de Velde). Signac wrote in 1887: ‘Our formula is certain
and demonstrable, our paintings are logical, and no longer done hap-
hazardly.’
This group, called for their technique ‘divisionists’ or ‘pointillists’, but
better known as Neo-Impressionists, was so set on the science of painting
that they took an interest also in rules of composition, directions of lines
and their emotional meanings, especially in conjunction with the emotional
meanings of colours. Once this move was made, however, the result was
not greater exactitude in representing nature but a radical departure from
this principle. There is a portrait of Felix Feneon by Signac which has a
background of circles, stars, bright vortexes, wavy lines in parallel forma-
tions and other, somewhat Celtic looking, shapes. Feneon had been the
first to write on Neo-Impressionism. Such an abstract background,
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heralding Italian Futurism of about 1910-15, was a compliment to him
who had said that Signac ‘sacrifices the anecdote to the arabesque’. How-
ever, the figure juxtaposed to abstract shapes remained a rarity. Seurat
never went so far. All the same, his figure-scenes are just as artificial and
stylised, painted not to catch a passing moment but to establish a sense of
permanence. The Impressionists, as Feneon put it, had been fascinated by
the ‘changes from second to second [of] sky, water, foliage’ and had
endeavoured to catch ‘one of these fugitive aspects on the canvas’. In
Seurat’s Afternoon on the Grande Jatte Island of 1884-6 everybody seems
to be fixed in one position. The figures are like wooden toys, simplified in
their outlines, stiff, mostly frontal or in profile and making only the most
elementary gestures. The bright colours and the close dots which form the
surface are the right accompaniment to this self-consciously naive, child-
like or childish treatment of a scene. In his later Circus and Chahut
Seurat went even farther in grotesque and bizarre stylisation.
If one recognises Seurat as a master of stylisation forcing nature into
elementary patterns (as indeed, for instance, van de Velde did when he
singled out Seurat as the artist who ‘ returned to style ’), it becomes possible
to see him as a complementary figure to Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), whom
Pissarro, the wisest of the Impressionists and the only one to understand
their later opponents as well, had called ‘this refined savage’. Cezanne
ever since about 1870 had worked tenaciously on the simplification of the
‘motif’, the ordering of the planes in a landscape, the cubic firmness of
houses, the apple-like solidity of a woman’s face. In all these patient
researches he yet never lost sight of nature. Seurat’s compositions seem a
short-cut compared with Cezanne’s. If the elementary and the essential is
the aim, Seurat’s world of dolls cannot be the answer. Yet he, like
Cezanne, believed in simple geometry as a remedy against the imperma-
nence of the Impressionist vision. Cezanne in an often-quoted letter to
Emile Bernard wrote : ‘All in nature is formed by the cylinder, the sphere,
and the cone.’ Cezanne’s art is much more than that, and he continues
this letter indeed by emphasising at once that for the painter all drawing is
colour and all modelling is colour. So his landscapes, still-lifes and
portraits have in the end a calm, reposeful nobility in which no sign of the
effort of concentration was allowed to remain. All the same, if one principle
can be singled out as underlying all these efforts it is faith in geometry as
the ordering force of the cosmos.
Emile Bernard (1868-1941), the recipient of the Cezanne letter just
quoted, was also a correspondent of van Gogh and a disciple of Gauguin.
Bernard for a few years steps into the limelight of history with a few
religious paintings and with work in the decorative arts. They belong to
the years 1888-90 when Bernard spent much time with Gauguin in
Brittany. Bernard was not a strong character, and he sought inspiration
from those more powerful than himself. He fives on more as the
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listener to Cezanne and van Gogh than as an artist in his own right.
Yet, although Bernard’s designing for applique and embroidery and for
stained glass was no doubt encouraged by Paul Gauguin (1845-1903),
who in the same years made crude vessels of earthenware and carved
reliefs in wood, Bernard’s religious painting rather inspired Gauguin than
the other way round. Bernard’s Deposition of 1 890 has excessively attenu-
ated figures in attitudes of high tension, influenced by medieval tapestry
and stained glass, but the painting as such lacks tension. However,
although the quality of Bernard’s pictures may be vastly inferior to that of
Gauguin’s, the return to subject-matter of emotional value remains a fact
of great significance. In Gauguin’s own religious pictures, the Jacob
wrestling with the Angel, the Yellow Christ and the Deposition, the intensity
of form and colour matches the subjects — and does so although Gauguin’s
sincerity was unquestionably less than Bernard’s. Could he otherwise
have painted that embarrassing Christ in the Garden, where he made
Christ a portrait of himself? In the Jacob wrestling with the Angel, painted
in 1888, the ground on which they stand is a violent red, an early case of
colour chosen in opposition to what he called ‘that damned nature’, and
purely for emotional reasons. Gauguin spent his summers in Brittany
because it gave him, after Paris, the sensation of ‘wildness and primitive-
ness ’. The peasant women praying to the vision of Jacob wrestling with the
angel or to the Crucifixus in the Yellow Christ — copied incidentally from a
piece of medieval Breton wood-carving — also signify earthy primitiveness.
The search for a primitive, an elementary, life was foremost in Gauguin’s
mind during these years. It took him for a year to Martinique in 1887, and
then in 1891 to Tahiti. He returned again in 1893, but went for good in
1895. In the tropics he found what he had been longing for, satisfaction for
his senses, a rich generous landscape, and women and girls (he did not often
paint men) blossoming like flowers in this landscape. The modelling is
summary, the colour warm, not hot, the gestures and the settings are
reduced to essentials. The titles of these pictures from Tahiti are painted on
in the native language and are often symbolic in their meaning : The Spirit of
the Dead watches or Whence do we come, where are we, whither are we going ?
The compositions are reminiscent of those of tapestries, with landscape
backgrounds boldly flattened and simplified and figures quietly standing,
sitting or lying, in frieze-like arrangement. It was Seurat who had spoken a
little earlier of ‘people moving about in friezes, stripped to their essentials’.
But Gauguin’s world is not the toy world of Seurat. It has greater weight
and nobility and in this allows comparison with the nobly ordered uni-
verse of Cezanne. The direct emotional appeal on the other hand connects
Gauguin with van Gogh. He accepted inspiration from Cezanne while
he was in Brittany, because he saw that it could be of use to him, but he
was not influenced by van Gogh although the two men spent a few ill-
fated months together at Arles at the end of 1 888.
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The idea of attempting such a companionship had been van Gogh’s,
who believed in ‘ groups of men gathered together to execute ideas held in
common’ as the redemption for the solitariness of the artist in the nine-
teenth century. Gauguin only toyed with Christian themes for a time and
soon settled down to enjoy his pagan world; Vincent van Gogh (1853-90)
was profoundly religious and essentially Christian. He had for a short
time been a lay-preacher before he became a painter. Van Gogh must be
the least talented of all great painters. Drawing and painting came to him
only after years of stubborn, unpromising efforts. Their intensity re-
mained the intensity of his life and his work during the short three or four
years of achievement. What is called intensity here was already before
these years occasionally called madness by those who knew him. That
van Gogh did go mad at the end of 1888, that he had a number of further
attacks after this first and that he finally killed himself, giving up the battle
against insanity which he had conducted with perfect sanity, concerns us
only marginally. His art is not mad — not madder than that of Grunewald ;
his illness only broke down the obstacles in his own protestant mind which
before the year 1888 had prevented his art from coming to full fruition.
There is less than a year between the end of his time in Paris, when he still
learned, and the day when he rushed forward to kill Gauguin in their
room at Arles. The early months at Arles are the months of his happiest
pictures, fully released at last and not yet obscured by the knowledge of
the heavy price he had to pay for his release. In Paris in 1886-8 van Gogh
had discovered the Impressionists, then the Neo-Impressionists, and
Japan as well. If he painted the first dealer who helped him, le pere
Tanguy, against a background of Japanese prints, that meant to him again
something different from what it had meant to Manet, to Whistler, to
Degas and to Gauguin. To him it was shadowless clarity of colour and
incisively drawn outline, and so he could write: ‘All my work is in a way
founded on Japanese art.’ As he moved from Paris to Arles, he wrote
home to his brother: ‘I feel I am in Japan.’ Even there, however, there is
nothing of the daintiness, the delicate balancing of values, as the Japanese
evolved them; all is impetuous, the result of frantic work in the southern
sun. He painted for twelve hours and slept for twelve hours; every so
often he forgot to eat; he worked ‘like one possessed’, like a reaper
‘fighting in the midst of the heat’, with ‘a terrible lucidity’, ‘wrung with
enthusiasm . . . like a Greek oracle on the tripod ’.
Gauguin went to the tropics to find this absorption in elementary
passion, and van Gogh agreed with him so much that he could write
(obligingly): ‘The future of painting is certainly in the tropics.’ But he
did not go himself, nor did he feel compelled to search for allegorical,
symbolic or indeed religious themes to express it. Gauguin, whose ruth-
less force and boisterous vitality he envied and admired, influenced him
only for a short moment. He objected to what he called the ‘abstraction’
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of Gauguin and his circle and insisted that he at least had to keep to the
motif in nature to set off his mind. One Gethsemane he had painted, but
he destroyed it. He wrote to his brother : ‘ They drive me mad with their
Christs in the Garden, where nothing is observed ’, and he warned Bernard
that his religious pictures might be ‘ an affectation ’, a ‘ mystification Can
one honestly try, he asked, to bring back the tapestry of the Middle Ages?
Instead van Gogh made it his job to paint the landscape that surrounded
him, the interiors he saw every day, still-lifes of humble objects and the
portraits of his few friends, but he painted them with a burning sense of
religious mission. He wanted to represent ordinary men and women
‘with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise’,
‘portraits of saints and holy women from fife..., and they would be
middle-class women of today and yet would have something in common
with the early Christians’; and he wanted to paint them in an interpreta-
tion and technique ‘as simple as those coarse engravings that you find in
country almanacs ’. Van Gogh was a much truer symbolist than the self-
conscious symbolists of Paris and Brittany were. Whatever he drew and
painted has a meaning beyond itself. The elements of composition and
even more the choice of colours are heavy with emotion. When he painted
a cafe at night he made it, by means of ‘soft Louis XV green and mala-
chite contrasting with yellow green and hard blue greens. . .in an atmo-
sphere of pale sulphur . . . , a place where one can ruin oneself, run mad
or commit suicide’. When he painted a book-shop in the evening ‘with
the front yellow and rose’ it became literally and figuratively ‘a focus of
light’. He describes in a letter how he paints a friend, a poet, and how,
after first having obtained a likeness, he set out to ‘exaggerate the fairness
of his hair’ in ‘orange, chromes and pale yellow’, to replace the back wall
of the ordinary room by ‘infinity’ in ‘the richest, intensest blue’ and so in
the end to achieve the expression of all ‘the love that I have for him’. And
in the portrait of Madame Roulin, better known as La Berceuse, he meant
to paint something ‘that would make sailors, who are at the same time
children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their boat . . . feel the old
sense of rocking come over them’.
But while his portraits aim at peace, his mature landscapes are turbulent
throughout — exalted in 1888, of a furious force of perpetual creation
later, and at the end sometimes the expression of ‘the extreme of loneli-
ness ’. Nature to van Gogh was not order as it was to Cezanne nor grandi-
osely rich and enchanting fertility as to Gauguin; it was chaos. You
cannot, he wrote to Bernard, ‘force chaos into a vessel; for it is chaotic
just because it cannot be forced into any vessel of our calibre. But what
we can do is ... to paint one atom of the chaos, a horse, a portrait, your
grandmother, apples, a landscape’. That is why, when he was faced with
any motif outdoors or indoors, his pen strokes or brush strokes forged
ahead, dashing, whipping, hammering, and his colours, put on broad and
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thick, glowed or burned, as pure as those of Seurat but never applied with
scientific reasoning. What he owed to the Neo-Impressionists is patent,
but it is not the essentials of his art. He knew already when he arrived at
Arles that he wanted ‘to exaggerate the essential’ (Gauguin had already
said the same in 1885: ‘There is salvation only in the extreme’) and
achieve colours ‘ like stained glass windows ’.
Bernard at the same time, as has been mentioned before, did a stained-
glass panel of Breton women, the same composition he used for the piece
of applique also already referred to. The rational consideration which at
this time led to the Arts and Crafts movement in England — the English
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had been established in 1888 — led
these French artists less self-consciously in the identical direction. One
universal principle, though one hesitates to use the word in relation to
Cezanne and van Gogh, is the decorative. Yet compared with the ethereal
naturalism of the Impressionists Cezanne’s surfaces, solid as the facing
slabs of a wall, and van Gogh’s mighty brush-strokes, applied in parallel
lines often curved or turning in on themselves, flaming or forming whirl-
pools, are as much decoration as Gauguin’s and Seurat’s ‘friezes’.
These are indeed the two principal aspects of the change in the later
1880’s: from realism to a new faith in subject-matter and expression, and
to a new faith in decoration; that is, to a conception of the painted canvas
as an organism of an intrinsic value other than that of representing some-
thing seen in nature. ‘A picture’, wrote Maurice Denis at the start of his
earliest article, ‘is essentially a flat surface covered with colours in a
certain order.’ Even Renoir underwent this change for a short time.
After a journey to Italy he experimented with a strengthening of his out-
lines in an attempt to emulate Raphael and Ingres. The principal outcome
is the exquisite group of Bathers of 1 884-7. Nor were the French alone
in desiring to return to expression and decoration. Mystical subjects and
long, disembodied, swaying figures appear in the paintings of the Dutchman
Jan Toorop (1859-1928; Faith Giving Way, 1891, etc.); sharply drawn,
more realistic figures in the forced, excessive attitudes of ritual dancers in
Ferdinand Hodler’s large allegorical panels (1853-1918: The Night, 1890,
etc.) ; subjects of elementary passion such as Despair, The Kiss, The Cry,
the Morning After in Edvard Munch’s (1863-1944) paintings, lithographs
and woodcuts. The lines may be overcharged with meaning — sperms
actually in the frame of Munch’s Madonna of 1895 — or they may repre-
sent just a vague yearning; they always undulate and they always tell of a
tension.
Here lies the parallel to the most interesting movement in purely
decorative art of the last decade of the nineteenth century, the movement
known in English and French as Art Nouveau, in German as Jugendstil, in
Italian as Stile Liberty. It is characteristic that Jugendstil is named after a
magazine, for the artists of book decoration were the first and most
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enthusiastic to turn to Art Nouveau, and that Stile Liberty is named after
the London shop of Liberty’s, which at first dealt largely in Far Eastern
goods and was connected with the British revival of decorative art. Britain
was indeed earliest in the field, and the title-page of Wren's City Churches
by Arthur H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942), with its writhing, twisting stalks
and leaves and the two excessively elongated cockerels squeezed against the
left and right sides of the frame, is now internationally recognised as the
first work in the Art Nouveau style. Its date is 1883. Its sources lie no
doubt in the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts, Morris wallpapers and
certain decoration of the English Gothic Revival. A parallel of the second
half of the t88o’s is the bronze sculpture and decoration of Alfred Gilbert
(1854-1934), best known as the sculptor of the Eros Fountain in Piccadilly
Circus (1887-93). The ornamental elements here and in other contempo-
rary works of Gilbert’s are as original as Mackmurdo’s and as undulating,
but they are three-dimensional and have a doughy, lava-ish quality derived
from other sources: probably Italian sculpture of Mannerism and Dutch
ornament of the seventeenth century. But Gilbert’s three-dimensional
work found no echo, whereas Mackmurdo’s in two dimensions was taken
up early by illustrators and other graphic artists, especially Aubrey
Beardsley (1872-98). He, for instance, in his Morte d' Arthur of 1892,
brewed of the same elements an exceedingly highly seasoned and not at all
healthy potion, intoxicating continental addicts even more than English.
Beardsley’s work was illustrated in volume one of The Studio. The
Studio started in 1893 and at once assumed the leadership in the propa-
ganda for the English decorative and architectural revival. Similar
magazines followed in France and Germany within less than five years.
They fought, not always in a narrow partisan manner, for the Impres-
sionists as much as the Post-Impressionists, for the sane Arts and Crafts
and the exquisite decadence of the Aesthetes, for a revival of folk-art and
an understanding of the subtleties of Japanese art. Magazines were
backed by exhibitions, those of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society
already referred to, those of the Independents in Paris and the equally
important ones of Les Vingt in Brussels (both founded in 1884). At
Brussels in 1892 the exhibition included for the first time stained glass,
embroidery and ceramics — four years after Gauguin and Bernard had
turned their attention to the applied arts. As a result of influences from
the English Arts and Crafts and this little French group the Neo-Impres-
sionist painter Henri van de Velde (1863-1958) turned away from painting
and moved towards design and architecture. His illustrations of 1892
(. Dominical) reflect the sinuous or resilient lines of Mackmurdo but
interpret them in an abstract way, without recourse to nature. Art
Nouveau decoration can indeed be vegetal or abstract. The former is seen
especially in the glass of Emile Galle (1846-1904) and the furniture, etc.,
of the school of Nancy to which he belonged, and also in the German
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book art of Otto Eckmann (1865-1902), the latter in van de Velde, the
Belgian architect Victor Horta (1861-194 6), the French architect Hector
Guimard (1867-1942) and the great Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh
(1868-1928). But whether in natural or abstract terms, the line of Art
Nouveau always undulates. It is reminiscent of whip-lash or flower-stalk,
of coral or gristle, of filaments or serpents, of flames or foam.
Its field is predominantly the surface, its job decoration, just as William
Morris’s had been. So Art Nouveau is strongest in the graphic arts, where
it caused a major revolution affecting not only illustration but also typo-
graphy and the poster. Here the best work was that of Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec (1864-1901) and the Beggarstaff Brothers (Sir William Nicholson,
1872-1949, and James Pryde, 1866-1941). Toulouse-Lautrec, painter
and draughtsman in the wake of Degas but appreciative friend of the Post-
Impressionists as well as of William Morris, whom he once called ‘the
answer to all questions’ about the revival of the art of the book and of all
art for everyday use, draws his stars of the cabaret with all the gusto and
piquancy of Art Nouveau. The Beggarstaffs keep to a soberer, indeed
more functional, style of bold flat surfaces. To textiles Mackmurdo had
already in the mid-i88o’s applied the style of his title-page of 1883. He
also designed furniture, remarkable not only for Art Nouveau decoration
in panels, but also for long slender posts with a flat, shallow, projecting
cornice put on top like a hat. Slender shapes instead of the ponderous
ones of the High Victorian taste had, as we have seen, already appeared in
the Art Furniture designed by Godwin under Japanese influence. Van de
Velde in the furniture for his own house at Uccle near Brussels (1895-6)
also used light, transparent forms. Soon, however, he and most of the
other decorators of Art Nouveau turned to ampler, more richly curved
shapes. Once more the English, from Mackmurdo to the best of the
younger craftsmen and designers of the Arts and Crafts such as Ernest
Gimson (1864-1919), remained saner and more functional, and thus
indeed outside Art Nouveau. The pattern is complicated but must be
understood to appreciate the European situation in decorative art about
1900. England had heralded Art Nouveau in the 1880’s. The fashion on
the Continent belongs to the 1890’s, by which time England had turned
away from it towards a more rational, less outrd, style out of which the
style of the twentieth century could grow.
England — not Scotland; for Glasgow possessed, in Mackintosh, the
most brilliant of all Art Nouveau inventors, and the only one to combine
the rationalism of the disciplined rectangular shapes of English Arts and
Crafts panelling and furniture with the most original abstract decoration.
The colours are sophisticated — white, mother of pearl, pale lilac, pale pink,
— but the structure to which they are applied is sound. Between 1895 and
1900 Mackintosh and his wife and her sister, the two Macdonalds, and a
number of others made Glasgow suddenly one of the centres of European
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art. In 1900 they exhibited in Vienna and there strongly influenced the
young architect-designers who had combined in 1898 to found the
Sezession.
The Glasgow school worked in wood, in glass, in metal. Art Nouveau
glass outside Britain is best known in the persons of Galle, already
mentioned, and of the American Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933). For Art
Nouveau metalwork one thinks at once of the fantastical iron decoration
of Horta’s house in the rue Paul-Emile Janson (1892-3). The role of iron in
the architectural movements of the late nineteenth century is manifold.
For the moment we are still concerned only with its decorative aspect.
Side by side with Horta’s work the wild iron decoration of the Paris
Metro stations (1900) and the block of flats known as the Castel Beranger
(1894-8), both by Guimard, must be remembered.
The exterior of the Castel Beranger may be weird, with its oriels and
gables and its total asymmetry, but it is angular and lacking in those very
qualities of curvaceous tension which characterise Art Nouveau. The
same is true to a lesser degree of Horta’s exterior of the house in the rue
Paul-fimile Janson, and even of Mackintosh’s country houses near
Glasgow, however original and pointedly asymmetrical their compositions
may be. The building, however, which established Mackintosh’s short-
lived professional success, the School of Art at Glasgow ( 1 897-9), combines
in its fagade features of Art Nouveau as creatively with features of a
bold functionalism as do Mackintosh’s designs for interior decoration.
The large studio windows with their unmoulded frames, mullions and
transoms are contrasted against the middle bay — not placed in the middle
— which has an eccentric grouping of motifs, curved and angular, light
and heavy. There is nothing left here of historicism. Again, incidentally,
in the defeat of historicism, Mackmurdo was ahead of Mackintosh. The
front of an exhibition stand he made in 1886 for the Century Guild, his
guild of craftsmen and designers, has not a motif that reflects styles of the
past. It is all exceedingly thin posts with the flat hats already described
and a heavy flat attic, again with short posts with hats on as its cresting.
But Mackmurdo soon became more moderate in his architecture.
The credit of having demonstrated radically and ruthlessly that Art
Nouveau was possible in architecture can go to only one man, an architect
working in a marginal country and exceptional circumstances: Antoni
Gaudi (1852-1926). He lived at Barcelona and there started with the crazy
Morisco-Gothic Casa Vicens of 1878-80, wild in its angular forms, wild
in its patterns of surfaces, wild in its spiky ironwork, the latter already
amazingly close to Art Nouveau. From here Gaudi’s originality and
daring shot up to higher and higher summits of utterly unfunctional
genius. The Palau Giiell was followed by the chapel for the Colonia
Giiell, the Parque Giiell and finally two blocks of flats in Barcelona of
1905-7 and the later parts of the grand unfinished church of the Sagrada
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Familia. Columns lean, pinnacles look like antediluvian monsters or
termite-heaps, coloured surfaces are made up of broken cups and saucers
and tiles, not only facades but even the shapes of the rooms in the flats
undulate, and stonework is like molten lava.
There can be no way beyond Gaudi and any attempt to imitate him
must lead to disaster. But is not the same also true of the more sophisti-
cated extremes of Art Nouveau decoration, of Guimard’s and Horta’s
ironwork, of Beardsley’s illustrations, even of van de Velde’s desks? That
is the ambivalence of Art Nouveau. In so far as it was made for the
aesthetes by the aesthetes it still belonged to the nineteenth century; for
the nineteenth century had been the century of art removed from the
fulfilment of needs, of art as the extreme skill of the individual, of art
appreciated only by the connoisseur. But in its break with period imita-
tion, in its re-establishment of originality. Art Nouveau heralds the
twentieth century. Admittedly the turn from historicism had begun with
Norman Shaw and H. H. Richardson, but only Art Nouveau presented it
radically. Such radicalism is alien to the English temper. Charles F.
Annesley Voysey (1857-1941) continued where Shaw and early Mack-
murdo had left off, but his charmingly simple and intimate country houses
are Tudor in derivation, however simplified the general shapes and details
have become. Voysey’s buildings and even more his fresh and pretty
designs for textiles and furniture once again impressed the Continent, but
as an argument against Art Nouveau rather than for it. Perhaps the
radicalism of Art Nouveau was needed if ultimately the greater, more
comprehensive radicalism of the twentieth century was to be reached.
Because Voysey kept his sympathy for the Tudor style and Shaw, in his
later years, discovered his for the Baroque of Wren, England in the first
quarter of the twentieth century went into compromises and dropped out
of the group of countries working for new solutions.
These solutions, wherever they were found, were found in reaction
against, not as a continuation of. Art Nouveau. The very radicalism of
Art Nouveau, necessary as it had been, defeated it after hardly more than
ten years. The more flamboyant a style the shorter will be its duration.
Fatigue sets in and even nausea. Thus it happened in Viennese Art
Nouveau, and the outcome was the strictly cubic style of the early
twentieth century inspired by Mackintosh and handled so superbly by
Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. Thus also it happened in Berlin in the
weightier style of Peter Behrens who was equally influential as an archi-
tect and an industrial designer. He built factories and office buildings —
no longer private houses — and he designed electric kettles, electric fans,
arc-lamps and the like — no longer domestic furniture, textiles and wall-
papers. Rationalism, functionalism and a social purpose, all preached by
Morris, made their appearance here just as they did in Auguste Perret’s
early concrete buildings in Paris and the rectangularity and the open plans
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of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses around Chicago and in the com-
mercial architecture of Chicago as well.
From the point of view of the twentieth century — that is, not strictly for
its significance within its own period — the commercial architecture of
Chicago is indeed the most interesting event of the i88o’s and 1890’s. The
architect who saw its problems most clearly and handled it with the
greatest aesthetic mastery was Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘lieber Meister’,
Louis Sullivan (1856-1924). Because of the high prices of the ground but
also because of publicity America had invented the skyscraper. It was at
first simply a high masonry building, but in 1884, at Chicago, iron frame
construction was applied to it, with stanchions and beams carrying the
building and allowing the interstices to be made of glass or other light
materials. As masters of iron and glass European engineers had preceded
the Americans. The Crystal Palace had been put up in 1851, all of its
1850 feet put up in five months, and the train-shed at St Pancras Station
in London, of 1863-5, had the widest span (240 feet) achieved up to
that time. It was outdone by the Galerie des Machines of the Interna-
tional Exhibition in Paris in 1889 which spanned 385 feet in the most
elegant construction. For the same exhibition Gustave Eiffel constructed
the Eiffel Tower, the highest building ever erected by man.
But these were not the works of architects. Architects of reputation had
kept characteristically aloof from this development. Morris, it will be
remembered, hated the machine and the effects of industry. Ruskin had
hated the Crystal Palace. Sir George Gilbert Scott, the most successful
English architect of the High Victorian decades, had paid lip-service to
the possibilities of metallic construction but never made use of them
himself. By far the most brilliant High Victorian building in which iron
and glass play a predominant part, Oriel Chambers at Liverpool of 1864,
was designed by a scarcely known architect, Peter Ellis. The first architect
of genius to get hold of the new technical possibilities and find a congenial
architectural form for them was Sullivan. His Wainwright Building at
St Louis of 1890-1 is a grid, emphasising in its rigidity the cellular con-
struction and the cellular use. Sullivan was not strictly adverse to orna-
ment; on the contrary he had in 1888, inside an early building, the
Auditorium, used a very original version of feathery leaf ornament that
heralds Art Nouveau almost as much as Gaudi’s ornament at the same
time. But he recommended his contemporaries to ‘refrain entirely from
the use of ornament for a period of years in order that our thought might
concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings comely in the nude’.
That is precisely what happened in the twentieth century.
The thirty years here described in terms of art and architecture are
indeed the beginning of a new age as they are the end of an old. Impres-
sionism had been the ultimate refinement of realism. Cezanne and van
Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, Toorop and Munch all turned away from
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realism, and the twentieth century continued into Expressionism and
Cubism and abstract art. Webb and Norman Shaw and H. H. Richardson
had been the ultimate refinement of historicism. Sullivan, Mackintosh,
Gaudi broke with history. So did the decorators of Art Nouveau.
But the twentieth century, inheriting from the painters as well as the
architects, inherited a curse as well as a blessing. Architecture and design
were enabled by the legacy they had received to work out a style which
expressed the new century and could be understood and accepted by
all. Painting and sculpture were driven instead into even greater loneli-
ness than that which had been the fate of Cezanne, Gauguin and van
Gogh. Abstraction had made architecture a universal tool; it made
painting and sculpture an expression so personal that it could hardly any
longer be communicated with certainty. The art and architecture of the
first third of the twentieth century, though they cannot be treated here, have
to be discussed in terms of this antinomy.
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CHAPTER VII
EDUCATION
E ducation during these thirty years exhibited certain similar
characteristics all over the world which enables us to view them
together across the national boundaries. Accordingly we shall be
concerned not with the various nations one by one, but with aspects of
education illustrated from time to time by some particular nation.
The study of the development and content of education cannot but be
ecological. Systems do not flourish in the air. They affect and are affected
by the social, pohtical, intellectual and religious structure as well as by the
movements of their time. Of no period was this more true than of the
last third of the nineteenth century. This was a period of the after-
math of wars in Europe, in America, in China and the Far East. It was a
period of vast industrial expansion and of the rise into importance of the
working class. It was a period of the expansion of Europe into Africa and
elsewhere. And above all it was a period of secularisation. The Church,
even in CathoUc countries, was losing its grip on one department of life
and thought after another. In education it saw the emergence of education
as a civil right and as the concern of the whole community as such, instead
of being merely a private or sectional concern.
One of the earliest aims of education, an aim as old as Plato, was the
training of a social elite in the art of government. This attitude to educa-
tion, which assumed that ability went with status, was but slowly replaced.
It was not until the nineteenth century that an educational elite was
recognised anywhere as an alternative to one that was purely social. Even
after 1870 the movement away from a social to an educational elite made
only slow strides.
There is probably no better example of this than the English ‘public’
school. 1 These had taken on a new lease of life with the reforms of
Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) at Rugby, but the development of science
and the growing criticism of endowments that marked the middle of the
century drew attention to their deficiencies. The Clarendon Commission
(1861-4) was therefore set up to investigate nine of the larger schools and
it reported that there was nothing really wrong with them. Indeed, ‘it is
not easy to estimate the degree in which the English people are indebted
to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most, —
1 In the English sense a ‘public’ school is one in which the governors are not owners
but trustees and any profit made goes back into the school. Other qualifications have been
added to this, the original definition, but this is the justification for the use of the term ‘ public ’.
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for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude
for combining freedom with order, their public spirit, their vigour and
manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public
opinion, their love of healthy sport and exercise . . . they have had perhaps
the largest share in moulding the character of an English gentleman.’
These lyrical sentiments were duly recognised in the Public Schools Act of
1868 which, however, dealt with the trust deeds of only seven out of the
nine schools, made no arrangements for inspection or supervision, and
left the head of the school in a completely autocratic position as against
the assistant masters.
Seven schools were not very many when one considers the large number
of endowed grammar schools in England in 1864, some of which dated as
far back as the eleventh century. Accordingly another commission was set
up in 1864 ‘to inquire into the education given in schools not comprised
within Her Majesty’s two former Commissions’ (Newcastle, 1859, and
Clarendon, 1861). The report of this extremely important Commission
(variously known as the Taunton or the Schools Inquiry Commission)
was issued in twenty volumes and represents an investigation into over
800 endowed schools and the examination of 147 witnesses. Although the
commissioners were concerned mainly with the use of endowments they
nevertheless sketched out a scheme of national education which had in it
the germ of later developments and which also recognised the urgency of
the case for modern as against classical studies. To implement their
suggestions they advocated the setting up of a central authority and a
system of local authorities. All schools should be inspected and examined,
and teachers should be trained after the manner of French teachers in the
Ecole Normale. So far, at least, had the commissioners got away from
the idea of training a social elite.
Although, since the Revolution, the elite in which the French believed
had been intellectual rather than social, this idea of the elite was a feature
of French education even more than of the English. Perhaps this was due
to the existence of a central educational authority which could organise
all grades of education, whereas in England such a central authority did
not appear until the Board of Education was set up in 1900. In France
there were no educational endowments. They had all been swept away by
the Revolution, and so private schools were almost all in the hands of the
Church, which ran schools for the poor and also for the well-to-do. When
the state came in it perpetuated the system of segregation, and secondary
education in France was a different kind of thing altogether from ele-
mentary education. There was no crossing over from the lower level to
the higher.
The German plans for the education of an elite were worked out some-
what differently from the French. They were linked up with university
entrance. Only students from the Gymnasium were free to enter the
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universities in any faculty that they chose. Those from the Realgymnasium
were barred from the theological faculty, and those from the Oberreal-
schule from medicine as well as from theology.
Apart from the inevitable exclusiveness of schools for an elite, main-
tained through high fees and a social cachet, the classical curriculum
created a further barrier which everywhere cut them off from the new
interests of the world outside. An increasing urge towards modem studies
was being exerted by changing industrial and social conditions, but here
again change was slow in coming. In England the Clarendon Commis-
sioners seemed almost oblivious of the changed times for they oozed
sentimentality about the advantages to the soul of man from the study of
Greek and Latin. When Edward Bowen (1836-1901) established at
Harrow in 1869 the first ‘modem side’ in an English public school he was
thought to be lowering his status in the scholastic world. In France this
emphasis was even more noticeable than in England for it was not compli-
cated as in England by social considerations. It was a matter of conviction
that even in a democracy the tradition of philosophy and politics required
an elite nourished on the classics. ‘Modem studies’ were utilitarian and
materialistic, necessary, no doubt, for business and industry but of a lower
order than the classics. The Ribot Commission of 1890, however, while
justifying the classical curriculum, entered a word of protest against this
inequality as ‘sheer injustice’.
In the Far East there were more decisive movements against the old
idea of training a merely social elite. In India the education given was that
of the governing (British) class and it was given in English — a policy which
separated the elite from the mass of the people — until the 1870’s. Then a
new type of elite emerged, not social, not educational, but nationalistic.
The Arya Somaj was founded about 1875 and the first Indian national
congress met in Bombay in 1885. In Bengal national schools, wholly
Indian, were founded, and the basis of the curriculum was Indian history,
literature and religion. In Japan there was no alien government to compli-
cate matters and after the fall of the Shogunate in 1867 the country
turned with enthusiasm to education on Western lines. The emperor
declared that henceforth the administration would look for men of
ability whatever their rank in society. The new elite was to be based on
educational grounds. China, too, turned to the West in this period. Up to
the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese educational system was
based on the Chinese classics, but from 1861 when two modem colleges
were started, one in Peking and one in Canton, there was a steady move-
ment towards Western education stimulated very largely by Americans.
After China’s defeat by Japan, which was attributed to the Westernisation
of Japan, the Viceroy Chang Chih-tung wrote a book, China’s Only Hope
(1895), which strongly supported this movement.
Nowhere was there to be found a better illustration of the educational
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philosophy of Europeans than in those areas in Africa in which their
governments could act without opposition. The policy, if it can be called a
policy, of the nineteenth century was to turn the more educable of the
native peoples into Europeans, although different governments interpreted
this in different ways. At Fourah Bay College, for instance, in Sierra
Leone, there was a long tradition of higher education on classical lines
sponsored by Durham University. Elsewhere, as in Mozambique, the aim
was simply to produce efficient and amenable servants for the white man.
French colonial policy went far beyond the British in West Africa and
opened the door of opportunity much more widely. The pick of the native
schools in the French territories were sent to Paris to complete their edu-
cation and the avowed aim was to turn this elite into African civil servants.
Similarly, the Belgians sent their most promising pupils from the Congo
to Brussels.
The aims of the education of colonial peoples thus varied between the
association of an African elite with the European government and the
production of a more efficient labour corps. For the most part primary
education and the training of teachers were in the hands of the missions
and other religious bodies while such higher education as existed was
subsidised by the state. It was not until after the great missionary con-
ference at Edinburgh in 1910 that the various colonial nations began to
accept the aim of education as the moral, physical and spiritual develop-
ment of the native people themselves.
The growth of new universities of a modern type in most countries of
the world and the reform of the old ones after 1850 was part of the slow
movement away from a social to an educational elite.
The two old universities of England were eulogised by John Henry
Newman (1800-90) in his Discourses on University Education for their
tutorial and residential system, which was modelled on the old craft guild.
But Oxford and Cambridge were not quite so perfect as he imagined
them to be. They were heavily clerical and Anglican, and governed by a
close corporation of celibate heads of colleges. The royal commissions of
1854 and 1856 resulted in a more democratic constitution for both of
them. The Test Act of 1871 swept away all religious tests except for a
degree in theology; even these have now disappeared. But the old uni-
versities still failed to satisfy some minds.
In the nineteenth century themaster-and-apprentice relation of the craft
guild was giving way to the employer-employed relationship. This change
was paralleled in education by the development of the attitude that educa-
tion was a commodity to be bought and sold. London University repre-
sented the new spirit. The virtual founder of it. Lord Brougham — the
‘learned friend’ of Peacock’s novels — was a Scot who saw to it that the
University should be as different as possible from Oxford and Cambridge.
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It was to have no religious tests, it was to have the lecture system rather
than the tutorial, and it was not to be residential. After a very stormy
existence it was reorganised in 1858, when it became little more than an
examining body giving degrees, the colleges being cut adrift and made
responsible for their own teaching. Two further royal commissions in 1889
and 1894 resulted in the Act of 1900, which in typically English fashion
chose both of the alternatives open to it. The university became both
internal and external, giving internal and external degrees, and at the same
time being a teaching university. Despite the curiously commercial atti-
tude that marked its early years London University did an enormous
service to English and even to world-wide higher education. Most of the
modern English universities began as colleges preparing for the London
external degrees and thus were able to start with a ready-made recognised
standard. Even colleges as far away as Montreal and Ceylon were also
able to benefit by their association with London.
Most of the new university colleges in England belong to the period
after 1870 and the spirit of the founders may be indicated by the aims of
Josiah Mason who established his college in Birmingham in 1880. It was
‘ to promote thorough systematic education and instruction adapted to the
practical, mechanical and artistic requirements of the manufactures and
industrial pursuits of the Midland district. . .to the exclusion of mere
literary education and instruction, and of all teaching of theology’. In
1881 the colleges in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool combined to form
the federal Victoria University, but after Joseph Chamberlain had turned
the Birmingham college into a university on its own — the first ‘civic’
university in Britain — Victoria was defederalised, and since then all later
university colleges have obtained status as single universities.
Federation continued to be the plan of the University of Wales for a
special reason. Wales is a bilingual country but one of its languages, unlike
those of Switzerland, is spoken only within the country itself. There is
also, as elsewhere, a marked difference between north and south, while
the mountainous terrain divides it up into still smaller and strongly indi-
vidualistic units. The Church of England and the Nonconformists repre-
sented a further division and within Nonconformity there was another
division between Independents and Calvinistic Methodists. In such a
situation the only bond of union could be patriotism for Wales itself, and
the campaign resulting in the establishment of a College at Aberystwyth
in 1872 gave it an objective. Colleges followed at Cardiff in 1883 and
Bangor in 1893, and in 1893 under the inspiration of Viriamu Jones the
three colleges were federated into the University of Wales which immedi-
ately became a rallying point for Welsh nationalism.
While England and Wales were developing new universities and colleges
the needs of Scotland were being satisfied by the four ancient foundations,
St Andrews (1411), Glasgow (1450), Aberdeen (1494) and Edinburgh
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(1582). These from the beginning were fashioned on the continental pat-
tern rather than that of Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps because of the
affinities of the Scots with France. One notable feature, however, of the
Scottish university system which marked it off from the continental
system was its close connection with the schools of the people. In the
German system the university was the determining body for all higher
education. It laid down the terms on which it would receive pupils and
the Volksschule was ignored. Similarly in France elementary and second-
ary education went along parallel lines which never met. The Scottish
universities were integrated into the school system, and just as there was
no specialised education for an elite at the school level so there was no
block in the way of the child of the village working his way up to a
university. A large number of university entrants came direct from the
primary schools.
The influence of German universities was also felt in England. Mark
Pattison (1813-84), the rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, wrote two
notable essays (1868 and 1876) on university reform, emphasising the
importance of research and condemning the current practice of treating a
university as a mere continuation school for grown-up schoolboys cram-
ming for examinations. A university should aim at ‘a breadth of cultiva-
tion, a scientific formation of mind, a concert of the intellectual faculties \
In the United States private enterprise was evident in higher education
and particularly in the universities. The outstanding university foundation
of this period was Cornell, which was due to the collaboration of Ezra
Cornell and Andrew D. White, its first president. In a notable speech
White made three points which justified the new venture. First, that as
regards primary education the state policy should be diffusion of re-
sources, but as regards university education it should be concentration of
resources. Secondly, that sectarian colleges are not adequate for the work
required. Thirdly, that any institution for higher education should be part
of the whole system of public instruction. To ensure the integration of the
university with the school system White had written into the charter the
provision of four ‘ state scholarships ’ for each of the hundred and twenty-
eight assembly districts.
After the Civil War existing American universities took on a new lease
of life. The revival was due first of all to a remarkable group of presidents
of whom White was one. Others were Noah Porter of Yale (1871), C. W.
Eliot of Harvard (1869), James McCosh of Princeton (1868), J. B. Angell
of Michigan (1871), andD. G. Gilman of Johns Hopkins (1875). Secondly,
there was the Young Yale Movement, the aim of which was a liberalising
of the studies and the association of the alumni with the control of the
college (not always a happy arrangement). Thirdly, there was the Morrill
Act of 1862 under which institutions for agriculture and engineering were
set up through the assistance of land grants. Agriculture had to fight its
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way from a merely rule of thumb practice to a scientific status and in this
Cornell, under Isaac P. Roberts (1874-1903), led the way. Engineering
had a better start, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been
established before the war. The Land Grant colleges, however, were not
confined to these subjects, nor were they confined to male students only.
The growth of these colleges went on despite the panic of 1873, and the
curriculum was widened. Asa Gray, Louis Agassiz, Clarence King, J. W.
Powell and Lewis Morgan, though not altogether in the first flight of
scientists, established science as a major subject of university education.
University education developed considerably in most countries of the
world at this time. Existing universities moved in the direction of greater
freedom of control or of secularisation (which usually came to the same
thing) and towards a technical curriculum. New universities were estab-
lished in response to local demand. At the same time many colleges, such
as that at Zurich, which began as technical institutes developed on uni-
versity lines. In 1873 Trinity College, Dublin, followed the example of
Oxford in 1871 by abolishing doctrinal tests. In 1879 the Royal University
of Ireland was established with which the Queen’s colleges of Belfast,
Cork and Galway became associated, but in the new century another
university was established in Dublin and a new university in Belfast.
In Switzerland the famous academy in Geneva became a university in
1876 and the theological college of Lausanne followed in 1891. A new
university was founded at Fribourg in 1889, specially intended for the
canton of that name. This association of a university with a particular
region marks a change from the earlier idea and was perhaps most notable
in the ‘civic’ universities of England. On the other hand the universities
in Scandinavia — Lund, Uppsala, Christiania and Copenhagen — continued
to be closely attached to the Lutheran state church. Racial and religious
factors were prominent in the development of universities in Belgium,
although not so much in Holland where the new university of Amsterdam
was founded in 1877. Considerations of sectarian scruples not only as
between Catholics and Protestants but also within Protestantism itself
affected university development in Canada where the university of
Toronto, for example, had to make allowance in the constitution for
Methodists, Presbyterians and both ‘high church’ and ‘low church’
Anglicans. This was similar to the ‘church related colleges’ which are
such a marked feature of American education. In South Africa the
Dutch Reformed College at Stellenbosch was on the road to becoming a
purely Afrikaans University. The London pattern was followed in the
University of the Cape in 1874 which gave degrees irrespective of the
college from which the students came, and by the University of Sydney
which, however, in 1884 began to grant degrees to students of affiliated
colleges. The University of New Zealand, founded in 1 870, affiliated to
itself colleges in Auckland, Christchurch and Otago.
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Education as a civil right is enrolled in the Declaration of Human
Rights of the United Nations. This is the culmination of a process which
began in the nineteenth century, namely the gradual secularisation of
education and its liberation from the control of religious and philanthro-
pic bodies. At the same time the idea of ‘the state’, so often used in a
pejorative sense and meaning usually ‘the government’, has begun to
give way to the more organic conception of the state as the whole com-
munity acting through its chosen officers. Thus the objection that was
current in this period that state education is the education of ‘other
people’s children’ was gradually seen to be false.
In England in addition to the ‘public schools’ and the many private
schools for the upper and middle classes there were schools for the
labouring classes. These were the outcome of philanthropy and were for
the most part Church of England schools belonging to the National
Society (1810), and undenominational schools belonging to the British
and Foreign Schools Society (1808). State ‘interference’ in education
began in 1833 and was limited to the subsidising of these two societies,
although the official in charge. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, managed to
make the grants a means of raising the whole standard of education. The
revised Education Code of 1862, however, made the grants dependent on
the results of an examination, failures in which entailed loss of grant by
the school. This was the system of payment by results, which continued in
England until 1895. Education was obviously a commodity and measur-
able as such.
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 gave the education societies a
year in which to establish more elementary schools if they could. Where
this was impossible a School Board was to be set up by the ratepayers to
establish a Board School, supported by a rate of threepence in the £. By
an Act of 1880 attendance at either Board or voluntary schools was made
compulsory. The Act of 1870 marked the first appearance in England of a
statutory authority for the provision of education and the weakening of
Church and voluntary control. This was not because of any anti-religious
feeling but simply because the money could not be found privately. The
‘secular solution’, as it was called, aimed at the disappearance of clerical
control and only in the second place had it anything to do with religion in
the curriculum. It was one of the most convinced believers in the secular
solution — T. H. Huxley — who most strenuously insisted on the Bible in
the schools. The clerical party, however, objected to religious teaching
being given by laymen, and Disraeli in the debates accused the govern-
ment of setting up ‘a new sacerdotal class’, namely the teachers.
The slowness of the development of state control in England was due
to a variety of causes. First there was the compromising English tempera-
ment. Secondly, there was the rooted belief of the Victorians in the divine
origin of class distinctions. Thirdly, there was the belated recognition of
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the inevitable result of education, which is the demand for more. No one
can call a halt and say ‘Thus far and no farther’. Fourthly, the belief,
almost ineradicable, that education is a private concern and parents’
rights in this regard should be inviolate. Fifthly, the absence of adequate
local government units and the dislike of the English for ad hoc authorities.
Not until 1888 when the County Councils were set up by Act of Parlia-
ment did there arrive a suitable local authority.
The Churches were not the only parties opposed to the development of
elementary education. The employers of labour put up a continual fight
against popular education which made itself felt in the recognition by law
of half-time employment. An Act of 1876 forbade regular employment
under ten and fixed the full-time age at thirteen. In 1901 the half-time age
was raised to twelve. In 1918 the compulsory full-time schooling period
was fixed at 14, and all regular employment before that age was forbidden.
In the same year all fees were abolished.
It is interesting at this point to compare England with Scotland. As far
back as the sixteenth century every kirk or parish in Scotland was expected
to set up a school for elementary subjects and for Latin, from which the
more competent children, rich and poor alike, should be able to go on to
colleges of higher education ‘until the commonwealth have profit of
them’. This truly ‘political’ aim was included also in the educational aims
of the Church, but in so far as it was accepted it was bound in the long run
to lead to the secularisation of control. The towns in particular grew
restive under clerical authority. The absence of class distinctions made
education the concern of everybody and it is interesting that in the
Scottish Education Act of 1872 the word ‘elementary’ was dropped from
the title as savouring too much of English snobbery. The teaching of
young children was not looked upon as almost a menial occupation as it
was in England. The benefits of Trusts such as the Dick Bequest (1828)
were put in the way of even the humblest village schools.
Scotland was a more homogeneous country than England in religion
and in social life, and even clerical control was not identified with a
governing class as in England. Nevertheless, the Act of 1872 took from
the presbyteries their long-standing right of visitation, the Burgh and
Parochial Schools Act of 1861 having already abolished the requirement
of the teachers’ subscription to a doctrinal statement. Scotland, moreover,
was one of the earliest countries to form an association of teachers, a
necessary step towards professional status. The Educational Institute of
Scotland was founded in 1847 and received its charter in 1851. Teachers’
associations introduced a third factor into the struggle for educational
control. Having a professional interest such associations were aligned
with neither Church nor state, although their existence helped the trend
towards secularisation.
Similar teachers’ associations were founded in Denmark, France and
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Switzerland. In England the College of Preceptors founded in 1856 was
a more academic body, but the National Union of Teachers founded in
1870 did not disdain the use of political pressure on behalf of teachers as a
class. In the United States Horace Mann and Henry Barnard founded the
National Association of the Friends of Education in 1849, which after
various internal changes became in 1870 the National Education Associa-
tion. This did not prevent individual states from having their own
associations, one of the earliest of which was founded in Rhode Island
in 1847.
The secularisation of education took different forms according to local
conditions. In the United States, where separation of Church and state is
written into the Constitution and where in consequence there is no
established Church, the relation of Church and state in education has been
concerned much more with the cost of education than with its control. In
this there has been a marked difference between the North and the South
as well as between one state and another.
In the South before the Civil War, patriarchal and rural education was
looked upon as the private concern of parents and churches. The Civil
War shattered this primitive system. Moreover, the slaves from being a
very considerable asset were now a serious liability and state action of
some sort was badly needed. Yet all attempts by the Federal government
to help education in the South were bitterly resented, although the
Southerners did not disdain help from private sources like the Peabody
Education Fund, established in 1867. The freedom given to four million
Negroes who were mainly illiterate and the political equality which followed
from it created a difficult and dangerous situation. The Freedman’s
Bureau set up by the government to help the Negro was very unpopular in
the South because it was run by Northerners. Moreover, it began to help
those at the top end of the educational ladder instead of those at the
bottom, and its first act was to found Atlanta University in 1867. Fisk
University was founded in Nashville in 1890. This policy was popular
with the more ambitious of the freedmen to whom education in Greek and
Latin was the badge of equality with the whites, but the more far-seeing of
the leaders such as Booker T. Washington (1858-1915) believed that above
all the Negro needed economic emancipation, and that the way to this was
by creating wealth, and wealth could be created only through training in
industry and agriculture. Washington himself had been trained at General
Armstrong’s agricultural institute at Hampton, Virginia, and he became
principal of a corresponding institution at Tuskegee in Alabama in 1881.
The Negro intellectuals looked down on these institutions on the ground
that they restricted the Negro to manual labour but it was clear that both
types of development were necessary, for the black South was no more
homogeneous than the white South.
In the Northern states general associations for the promotion of educa-
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tion sprang up everywhere. Here, as in the South, there was a marked
difference between urban and rural areas. It was the urban areas that
wished for education to be tax-supported, publicly controlled, non-
sectarian, compulsory and free. Here therefore the state had to wrestle
not with the Federal authorities but with hundreds of little communities
each wanting to go its own way. However, as elsewhere, financial needs
finally determ in ed where the control should lie. New York was the first
state to have a state superintendent of common schools. By 1861 twenty-
eight states out of thirty-four had put education into state hands. Church
authorities were gradually squeezed out from the state system and with the
exception of West Virginia no state admitted to the Union after 1858 made
any provision in its constitution for denominational schools.
This movement towards secularisation was felt all over the world. The
Australian colonies which had begun, like England, by giving subsidies to
denominational societies, brought the system to an end in New South
Wales in 1858 and throughout the continent by 1863. In Denmark educa-
tion from the seventeenth century had been essentially a state affair.
Holberg (1684-1754), who was the real founder of Danish popular educa-
tion, had declared that ‘children must become persons before they become
Christians’.
The situation in France was complicated by the fact that a Catholic
country owed its educational system to the Republic, which believed in a
system of lay education given by laymen. The Republicans wanted educa-
tion to be compulsory, secular and free, teaching a morality independent
of the Church. On the other hand, the right wing stood for the rights of
the Church in this as in other spheres. Control, subsidies, curriculum and
the status of teachers were thus affected by the see-saw of French politics.
However, one result of the French defeat in the war of 1871 was that more
money was spent on schools, and under Jules Ferry (1832-93) as minister
of public instruction elementary education became secular, free and com-
pulsory. In 1901 all religious bodies had to apply for state permission to
carry on teaching, and under Combes in 1904 all teaching by religious
brotherhoods under clerical direction was suppressed.
Switzerland, after a series of violent political convulsions, tackled this
question of Church and state in education, and in 1 874 the canton Bern
secured the supremacy of the state over the Church, while Geneva
demanded of the clergy an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Article 27
of the Constitution of 1874 put education exclusively under the civil
authority, and the Confederation was empowered to take the necessary
measures against cantons that did not fulfil their obligations.
In Germany the movement towards secularisation had a long history.
In all the states education had made vigorous progress in the heyday of
the Romantic revival and this new humanism was opposed to clerical
control. The revolution of 1848, however, in Germany as elsewhere
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resulted in violent reaction, and the new regulations for schools took as
their norm the little rural school from which no breath of revolutionary
fervour was ever likely to come. Frederick William IV of Prussia (1840-
61) introduced into the political situation an aura of mysticism which had
very serious results. He was a believer in the divine right of kings, and in
his eyes the state and not merely the Church was the handmaid of God.
Every elementary school in the country was thus drawn into politics.
Nevertheless, in the reorganisation of the educational system by Falk
between 1872 and 1879 responsibility was put squarely on the shoulders of
the state. The right of supervision of elementary education by the Church
was taken away and the work was given to superintendents who were
officers of the state. This affected the curriculum also. The Emperor
William II in opening an educational conference in 1890 came out
strongly in favour of modern studies in opposition not only to the ancient
classics but even to the classics of Germany. Classical studies, he said,
had produced an educated proletariate which was not at all what was
needed by the new empire. Goethe’s idea of national character gave place
to Bismarck’s view of the individual in subservience to the state.
Relations between Church and state in Germany present, therefore, an
aspect unique among the countries of Europe. It is difficult to call it
simply secularisation except that control was taken from the Church as
such, for as the state was now a mystical divine ‘person’ control by the
state was as much a religious concern as political. This was indicated by
the emphasis on patriotism and by the large part played by compulsory
military service whereby every male teacher in every school became a
representative of the armed might of the state.
In the more backward European countries primary education at least
continued to be either directly or indirectly under the Church. In Russia,
for instance, primary education, such as it was, came under the Holy
Synod and the local priests. No teaching certificate was required of the
teachers and the priests were so fully occupied with their parochial duties
that they allowed the schools to fall into neglect. Such education was
almost entirely vocational. Secondary and university education were
confined to the wealthier classes and were characterised by a strong
suspicion of natural science and of Western political ideas. It was not until
after the revolution of 1905, which followed the defeat of Russia by
Japan, that there was any general development in education. Even in
Belgium, although the state took over all communal schools in 1878, the
clergy resisted and refused absolution to teachers in the ‘godless’ schools.
In 1884 a Catholic government came into power and reversed the action
of its predecessor. In Spain a law of 1 857 made primary education com-
pulsory but this remained so much a dead letter that in the early years of
the twentieth century the great majority of the people were still illiterate.
In 1902 the Liberal government under Sagasta passed a law requiring all
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private schools and colleges to be licensed by the state and to submit to
inspection, but after the accession of Alfonso XIII Church influence again
prevailed. Similar influences were at work in Portugal where at an even
earlier date, 1844, education of children from 7 to 15 was declared com-
pulsory. This law also was a dead letter and the purpose of it was lost in
the struggle of Church and state.
In his report to the Newcastle commissioners in 1861 Matthew Arnold
took the opportunity to draw their attention to wider issues which for
most people had not yet appeared above the horizon: ‘The Education
Commissioners would excite, I am convinced, in thousands of hearts a
gratitude of which they little dream, if, in presenting the result of their
labours on primary instruction they were at the same time to say to
the Government “Regard the necessities of a not distant future, and
organise your secondary instruction”.’ This became a slogan for the
reformers.
The situation, however, was complicated by the fact that in most
countries there was already in existence a system of secondary education
in private hands and on a class basis. England had its so-called ‘public
schools ’ for a limited class of people. In France secondary schools were
unconnected with the primary school system. Parents decided whether
their children should go into the secondary or into the primary and, once
settled, there was no crossing over. In Scotland there was already a
direct road from the parish school to the university, so that secondary
education, when it came to be provided by the state, was a movement from
the universities downwards quite as much as a movement from the ele-
mentary school upwards. The secondary schools, when they arrived, took
their place at once alongside the academies and burgh schools because the
same class of children were to be found in both.
There was another difficulty. What was to be the aim of secondary
education? Was it an extension of elementary education, a little more of
what the doctor ordered, or should it be a different thing altogether,
different in form as well as in content? Ought it to be a preparation for
the university? Was it to be determined by the class to which a person
belonged and if so ought it to educate him to fit into that class or should
it help him to rise out of that class?
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 producedin England a craving
for further education, and in areas where the wishes of the parents were
sufficiently insistent the Board schools themselves grafted higher classes
on to the elementary schools while the London and some other school
boards even built ‘higher grade schools’. All this of course was strictly
illegal, for public money was being used for wider purposes than those
sanctioned by the Education Acts. The parents, however, were not the
only group concerned. The training colleges for teachers were beginning
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to realise the need for a higher standard of entrance than that given by the
elementary schools. Meanwhile it was discovered that children were
seeking entrance to training colleges as one of the means of securing a
higher education whether they went on to teaching or not. The establish-
ment of university colleges again showed the need for secondary education
as a groundwork, especially in the teaching of science. All these influ-
ences combined to put pressure on the government.
Sir Robert Morant, an official of the education department, supplied
the facts of the school board situation to Cockerton, the government
auditor, who thereupon surcharged the members of the London School
Board with the cost of the education which they had provided for children
beyond the compulsory age. The Board lost on appeal and the ‘ Cockerton
Judgement’, as it was called, became a test case.
This precipitated legislation. The action of the London School Board
had to be legalised but this could be done only within the framework of a
larger scheme. One difficulty, of course, was that a school board, except
in large cities, was too small a unit to handle anything beyond elementary
education. In 1888, however, new units of local government had been
established, namely the county councils, and, as we have seen, these new
bodies were almost immediately given powers over technical education in
their area, subsidised out of the surplus of the tax on whisky. Secondary
education, however, was too big a problem to be dealt with in this piece-
meal fashion, and the Bryce Commission was appointed in 1894 to con-
sider the matter. On its recommendation the county councils in 1902
were made the effective unit for all types of education in their area, and a
Board of Education was established in 1900 to be the central authority
under parliament for education. In 1944 the Board was turned into a
Ministry and thus given status parallel with that of other Ministries.
The organisation of secondary education in Wales was difficult because
of its widely scattered rural population. In 1889 the Intermediate Educa-
tion Act was passed which provided for a new type of day school not
quite so ambitious as the three existing grammar schools at Brecon,
Bangor and Llandovery. Thirty such schools had been founded by 1895.
The county was not then felt to be a suitable body to control this new
venture and although Sir John Rhys and Viriamu Jones wished that it
should be controlled by the university a separate Central Welsh Board was
set up in 1896. This was a curious body, quite remote from its constituents
and therefore tending to emphasise examination results. These objections
were got rid of when the Act of 1899 set up the Board of Education for
England and Wales and the Act of 1902 promised a more realistic unit for
secondary education.
In Scotland school boards had also been established, but these were not
abolished till 1918. Scotland indeed had long had a national system of
education from the parish school to the university. But secondary schools
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under state auspices were also very much needed, and the Argyll Com-
mission (1864-8) was appointed to inquire into all the schools of Scotland,
including secondary. Of all these schools only five in all Scotland were
properly secondary schools, for all the others presented ‘a confusion of
infant, primary and secondary schools combined in one’. The ‘burgh
schools ’ were strongly classical in their curriculum whereas the ‘academies ’
had begun by introducing science and commercial subjects, although by
1864 there was not very much to distinguish them from the burgh or
grammar schools. As we have seen, the Act of 1872 established school
boards and allowed them a year’s grace to provide for all the educational
needs of their area, after which the voluntary bodies were to be given the
opportunity to make good any deficiency and to receive grants for the
purpose. In England the arrangements were the other way round, for the
voluntary bodies were given the first chance and were given no building
grants to help them.
From the beginning the Scottish school boards took a wider view of
their duties, but the Revised Code of 1862 had a somewhat unfortunate
effect on the parish schools. There was a falling off of advanced subjects,
although Scotland was never so much demoralised by the Revised Code as
England. Accordingly the Colebrooke Commission was appointed to
inquire into all educational endowments in Scotland. Its deliberations
resulted in the Endowed Institutions Act of 1878 which authorised the
setting up of a permanent commission of seven to determine the uses to be
made of endowments, with a special concern for higher education.
The development of secondary education in Germany was along middle-
class lines, but was influenced by politics much more than in almost any
other country. The Realschule had become a permanent alternative institu-
tion in German secondary education alongside the Gymnasium. It was a
symbol of the emancipation of the middle classes from both clerical and
aristocratic control. Meanwhile, at a lower level the Mittelschule, which
was really a higher primary school rather than a secondary school, arose
out of the Volksschule just as in England the Higher Grade School arose
out of the elementary school. By a ruling of 1872 children could be trans-
ferred to it at the age of 9 and stay until they were 15. It had a higher
social value than the primary school. Tuition fees were charged but they
were only half those of the secondary schools. So the Mittelschule made
the same appeal to parents in Germany as the private schools did to
parents in England. They were unable to pay the fees for the highest type
of school but on the other hand they were higher in the social scale because
their education was not free. In all there were six types of secondary
school — three with a nine-year course, that is, the Gymnasium, the Real-
gymnasium, and the Oberrealschule; and those with a six-year course,
that is, the Progymnasium, the Real-progymnasium and the Realschule.
In France Victor Duruy (1811-94) in his policy of liberalising educa-
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tion established in 1865 what he called enseignement secondaire special,
which after the war of 1870 was developed by the Republic along three
lines — higher elementary schools, cours complementaires, and technical
schools for agriculture, handicrafts and commerce. It was not, however,
till 1880 that the organisation of a definite secondary system under state
auspices was begun. There were founded the conseil superieur and the
Cornells academiques. These were almost entirely elected bodies, and
admission was limited to members of learned societies and the teaching
profession. This was a decided innovation in educational administration
for it put the teachers on a level with university professors and politicians.
French education has always been strongly centralised, ever since
Napoleon in 1808 joined together all the various grades of education into
a single system called the University of France. This principle, which had
as its central idea the creation of a lay body of opinion over against the
Church, survived both the Revolution of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian
War. Hence the University determined the nature of secondary education,
rather than secondary education being a development from below.
The higher primary schools were not unlike the intermediate schools in
Wales or the Mittelschulen in Germany. Two types of examinations were
arranged for the pupils — one leading to the normal schools for primary
school teachers, and the other with the paradoxical title of certificat
d'etudes primaires superieurs , which was a general certificate. School
hours were from 8 to 12 and 1 to 4, and were a dull grind leading to
a high degree of merely mechanical efficiency. The schools also suffered
from being over-inspected— a fault which was carried over into the
normal schools for teachers which were established in each ‘department’
from the year 1879. It is not surprising that there was a great dissatisfac-
tion with these schools, and this led to an examination of the whole of the
French education system. M. Ribot declared to a parliamentary com-
mission in 1899 that ‘all over the world one hears complaints about
secondary education’.
Secondary education was given by the state in lycees, and by the com-
munes in colleges, while allowing for private institutions as well. The
career open to talent was for pupils from these alone, for secondary educa-
tion had this class bias. There was an extraordinary similarity of type in all
these institutions and one of the aims of the Ribot commissioners was to
break down this monotony. In the case of the lycees they wished the
boarders to be distributed among approved families instead of being shut
up in an institution. It is interesting that this was the opposite to the plan
of Dr Arnold, who took his boys away from lodgings and put them into
school ‘houses’. Yet there was also a tendency in the other direction, as in
Demolin’s book A quoi tient la superior it e des Anglo-Saxons? (1897), which
led to the establishment of five boarding schools on English lines. The
commission resulted in a reorganisation of French secondary education
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in 1902, the same year as the English Education Act. The curriculum of
the lycees was to lead up to an examination for the Baccalaureat which
normally acted as the entrance qualification for a university. The colleges
were of a lower grade and had their own certificate instead of the Bacca-
laureat. Private secondary schools were to be inspected by the state.
Their teachers must not belong to any religious order and they must have
a teacher’s diploma. There were lycees for girls as well as boys and a
training college for women secondary teachers was established at Sevres.
The earlier years of the nineteenth century had witnessed a notable
development in educational theory and a willingness to put it into prac-
tice. The three great names in this connection were those of Pestalozzi
(1746-1827), Froebel (1782-1852), and Herbart (1776-1841). The writings
of each influenced education far beyond the lands of their origin and
showed a remarkable capacity for revival long after the first enthusiasm
for their works had died away. Pestalozzi had insisted that education
comes through things rather than through books and that education
ought to follow the development of the child’s mind. From Pestalozzi’s
belief that the chief teacher is experience Herbart had developed a theory
of the importance of the ‘many-sided interest’ for character formation,
while from the conviction that all development is from within Froebel
developed his theory of self-activity — ‘ the child has the right to be at each
stage what that stage requires’.
Froebel’s ideas came into England in 1854 and were advocated by
Charles Dickens. The word ‘kindergarten’ became naturalised in English
as a description of Froebelian schools. But the schools established at this
time were private schools for the wealthier classes and it was not until
1874 Froebel’s principles began to affect the infant schools every-
where. The first kindergarten in the United States was established in
Boston by Elizabeth Peabody in 1 860, and under the influence of Dr W. H.
Harris and Susan Blow it became part of the public school system in
St Louis in 1873.
Froebel’s ideas did not pass, however, without criticism, at any rate in
England. Miss Charlotte M. Mason founded the Parents’ National Educa-
tion Union in 1887 and she criticised the curriculum of the kindergarten
for a certain spirit of condescension which had crept in. Miss Mason felt
it to be a mistake to shut children off from reading and she declared that
‘ no education seems to be worth the name which has not made children
at home in the world of books’.
If Pestalozzi and Froebel were particularly influential in primary and
infant schools Herbart’s influence was mainly felt at the higher stage.
Ziller (1817-82) developed from Herbart’s doctrines what is called the
‘Culture Stages Theory’. He believed that the material of the curriculum
should be chosen according to the psychological stages of the child’s
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growth, and that these stages correspond to the development of the race.
When Herbartianism reached America it was this aspect which interested
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), and his great book Adolescence, its Psycho-
logy and its relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Science and
Education indicated in its very title the Herbartian ‘many-sided interest’
and was based on an acceptance of the Culture Stages theory. A still
greater name in America was that of William James (1842-1910), physi-
cian, physiologist, psychologist and philosopher. He was concerned with
both religion and science, and therefore with both experience and instruc-
tion. His Principles of Psychology (1890), one of the classics on the sub-
ject, claimed the right of psychology to be a special science, not a mere
annex of physiology or of philosophy. His chatty popular style and his
gift of the telling phrase and illustration helped to apply common sense
not only to psychology but also to education, and emphasised the con-
nection of both with living people rather than with mere theory. His
Talks to Teachers on Psychology has probably had a greater influence on
educational practice than any other book of its kind.
Thus in America in the 1890’s Herbartianism gave rise to contrary
schools of thought which were long in collision. It provided on the one
hand a rational logical explanation of the process of learning and there-
fore fitted in with the scientific temper of the age. On the other hand, by
its stress on literature and history as the two most character-forming
subjects it was out of step with the popular enthusiasm for science and
mathematics. Herbartianism provided assistance both to the rationalists,
who were inclined to identify encyclopaedism with virtue, and to the other
side, to whom education was a matter of cultivated imagination and
emotion.
England has never been strong on the theoretical side of education, but
the scientific movement in the later years of the nineteenth century pro-
duced a very notable book as a counter-blast to the classical monopoly in
the schools and on behalf of the educational value of the new ‘modern’
subjects. This was Herbert Spencer’s book on Education, Intellectual,
Moral and Physical (i860). Spencer (1820-1903) had already provided a
slogan for the Darwinian doctrine of evolution — ‘the survival of the
fittest’. He was in the thick of the new scientific movement, and he was a
strong believer in knowledge in the sense of information. He divided
knowledge under five headings in a descending order of importance,
beginning with physiology and ending (a long way down the list) with
literature and the fine arts which, ‘as they occupy the leisure part of life, so
should they occupy the leisure part of education’.
Spencer’s book was not particularly original, but it set going an interest
in science as a subject of education and as an alternative to the classics.
A contemporary of his, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), combined a
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training in science with a truly humanistic outlook on life. He saw more
clearly than any of his generation that the Darwinian theory applied to
many other aspects of life besides that of natural science. That theory, put
in its simplest form, came down to this, that the nature and purpose of an
organism are to be discovered in its development. Every institution had to
be understood through the way in which it had developed. How did it
arise and what have been the stages through which it has passed? Is there
any justification for its continuance? The same questions were relevant
about the Bible, theology, the franchise, the status of the labouring classes
and the subjection of women. To serve on all these institutions a writ of
Quo Warranto? and make them stand and deliver was a heartening
exercise for the young and the adventurous, and it is not surprising that
Huxley felt himself to be at the head of a band of young crusaders.
Huxley’s influence on education was enormous. He believed in the
value of science as a liberal education, but he was perfectly well aware that
its value depended on how it was taught. And he himself knew how to
teach it — and to write it. Education, he said, ‘is the instruction of the
intellect in the laws of nature, under which name I include not merely
things and their forces but men and their ways, and the fashioning of the
affections and the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in har-
mony with those laws’. For the people of his generation Huxley was the
greatest scientist of his time, but what was forgotten, if indeed noticed,
was his concern for literature and the Bible. At the newly formed London
School Board (of which he was a member) it was his advocacy that
retained the Bible in the schools at a time when it was actually proposed
to drop it.
Science in education, however, followed the line of Spencer rather than
that of Huxley. It had gone to men’s heads, and they talked and thought
and dreamt science. Cheerfulness, of course, kept breaking through, for
science had given amateurs something to play with. John Henry Pepper —
the inventor of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ — showed even in the titles of his widely
circulated books what fun could be got out of science — The Play book of
Metals, Scientific Amusements for Young People, and Cyclopaedic Science
Simplified. But as far as the schools were concerned science was looked
upon partly as a discipline but mainly as a means of getting on in the
world. ‘Knowledge is power’ was a favourite maxim and knowledge
meant scientific knowledge.
After 1872 organised science schools alternative to the elementary
schools sprang up. They were under the Science and Art Department,
which had been founded at South Kensington in 1853 as a result of the
enthusiasm for industry created by the Great Exhibition of 1851. (It was
under the Privy Council and so had a status parallel to that of the Educa-
tion Department. Both were absorbed into the Board of Education in
1900.) They began by teaching nothing but science, and represented an
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attempt to introduce into England something like the German Real-
schulen but with no literary studies. Huxley, however, soon saw the
science schools as mere cramming shops, and it became clear that a
specialised education here as everywhere else required a good general
education as a basis. Hence the organised science schools added literary
subjects to their curriculum at the same time as the schools labouring
under ‘payment by results’ were being modified by the influence of
science grants from South Kensington.
Meanwhile science made for itself an enclave in higher education. The
London School of Mines became in 1881 the Royal School of Mines and
in 1890 the Royal College of Science. And in the 1880’s ‘science’ came to
mean more and more applied science, so that technical education became
specialised within the general field of scientific endeavour. In 1884 a royal
commission inquired into the provision of technical education and in 1889
the Technical Instruction Act gave the newly established county councils
a fund for technical and scientific instruction. The newly established uni-
versity colleges were all concerned with science. Leeds had a department
of dyeing before it had a department of English.
The situation in Germany was not dissimilar from that in England.
Just over the border in Switzerland there had been established in 1 854 the
great Polytechnic at Zurich. It became a model for institutions of similar
sort in Germany which later were to turn themselves into universities. At
the school level, however, the preparation for scientific and technical
education had long been laid in the Realschulen which dated from the end
of the eighteenth century. In 1870 boys who had completed a full course
of nine years at a Realschule were admitted to the university for studies in
mathematics, natural science and modem languages, even though the
Realschule was still looked upon as the sort of school to which the less
intelligent members of the community were sent. Nevertheless, the recog-
nition and development of modern studies showed an awareness that we
live in a competitive world and that an industrial and commercial society
requires for the younger generation the kind of education which will
enable them to hold their own within it. From the time of the Conference
of 1890 (see p. 188) scientific and technical education came in for popular
approval because it was in keeping with German ambitions in industry and
commerce.
The scientific movement which characterised this period under review
was apt to be a new form of scholasticism. Only the content of education
was new. It was a long time before the educational importance of science
was realised, for this required an understanding of the characteristic ways
of teaching it, and as yet there was no great difference in method between
the teaching of science and the teaching of any literary subject. Indeed,
H. G. Wells was believed to have taken his B.Sc. without ever having seen
inside a laboratory. Professor H. E. Armstrong was a pioneer in new
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methods of teaching science (1884) to which he gave the name ‘heuristic’
or ‘the art of making children discover things for themselves’. This was a
fancy name for the use of experiment in teaching science, a method so
obvious nowadays that it is extraordinary that it took so long to discover.
The application of scientific method to child study had to wait till the turn
of the century when Binet outlined his method of testing intelligence.
At no point does the dependence of education on social structure and on
current movements of thought become so evident as in the education of
women. It is interesting that a class distinction here cut across the sex
distinction. On the whole girls of the working classes everywhere received
the same education as boys and sex made no difference. This was due not
to any sense of the equality of the sexes but rather to the belief that such
girls as well as boys were destined to a life of manual labour. Accordingly,
when we speak of girls’ education as a separate subject we are not
including girls of the working class.
In England it was in the middle and upper classes that girls’ education
was so poor and it was here that sex distinction meant everything. The
girls were taught either at home under ill-qualified governesses or in
private schools the aim of which was to train in ‘accomplishments’ of a
very superficial kind. The higher education of women was handicapped
by this lack of school education, and in England the pioneers of women’s
education saw that they must tackle the schools as well as the universities.
The Schools Inquiry (Taunton) Commission in 1864 exposed the poverty
of girls’ education and even the Victorian commissioners were induced to
recognise the importance of secondary schools for girls and their urgent
need for support and endowment.
Some progress had already been made. Dorothea Beale had become
the principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College in 1858, a post which she held
till her death in 1906. Under her the school developed in various direc-
tions, with a residential training college for secondary women teachers at
one end and at the other a kindergarten class preparatory to the main
school. Associated with her name was that of Frances Mary Buss (1827-
94) who had been with Miss Beale at Queen’s College in Harley Street.
In 1850 Miss Buss opened the North London Collegiate School for girls,
which in 1871 was turned into a school administered by trustees. She was
noted for her unusual views about hygiene and about study, and she put
an end to the then fashionable habit of swooning by dashing cold water
into the face of the patient !
The problem of higher education for women involved an attack on the
universities. In regard to women’s degrees the United States, Switzerland
and the Scandinavian countries were ahead of Britain, but in 1878 the
University of London admitted women to degrees. From the start the
Victoria University was open to both sexes and so too was the Royal
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University of Ireland. In 1892 the four Scottish universities were opened
to women.
The real bastions of male privilege, however, were Oxford and Cam-
bridge, and the attack on these seats of learning illustrates at least one
fundamental principle of social and educational progress. The two leaders
in this campaign were Miss Davies and Miss Clough. Emily Davies, the
founder of Girton College, started first at Hitchin, some distance from
Cambridge, and only moved to the outskirts of Cambridge in 1 870. She
wanted for her girls full equality with men in taking university courses and
examinations. Anne Jemima Clough was a Liverpool woman who had
already established courses of lectures for governesses. Encouraged by
Professor Henry Sidgwick she transferred her activities to Cambridge and
in 1874 she established Newnham College, which was placed right in the
heart of Cambridge because Miss Clough was concerned not about
examinations but about lectures. When the two colleges were well estab-
lished it was quite easy for Girton to ask to be admitted to lectures and
Newnham to ask to be admitted to examinations, and they gained their
point.
This, however, was only half-way. The question of degrees remained.
At this stage the University of Cambridge offered to establish for women
a parallel university, somewhat on the lines on which Radcliffe is the
women’s university parallel to Harvard. Miss Clough would willingly
have accepted it but Miss Davies rejected it out of hand. She saw clearly
the principle involved, namely that if you get differentiation before you
get equality you will never get equality. The men must be met on their own
ground and beaten on their own ground before there can be any talk of
difference. Accordingly in 1887 it happened that Agnata Ramsey of
Girton gained the highest first class in the Classical Tripos, but even this
achievement was thrown into the shade when in 1890 Philippa Fawcett of
Newnham entered the holy of holies and was graded above the senior
wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos. After this there was less talk about
the alleged intellectual inferiority of women.
In 1871 Mrs Maria Grey established a National Union for the Improve-
ment of the Education of Women of All Classes, and next year the Girls’
Public Day School Company was founded. Oxford and Cambridge insti-
tuted local examinations to which girls were admitted. Women educa-
tionists threw their weight on the side of day schools rather than boarding
schools, and as they were not bound by centuries of tradition like the boys’
public schools they were free to experiment both in teaching methods and
in discipline. Moreover, the fact that the schools were day schools made
them accessible to parents of modest means. The schools were not all of
one pattern. Day schools were the most approved but three boarding
schools were founded after the pattern of the boys’ public schools —
St Leonards (1877), Roedean (1885) and Wycombe Abbey (1896).
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The growth of girls’ schools led to a movement for co-education. This
had always been followed in some Quaker Schools, thus following the rule
of the equality of the sexes in that body, but now it became advocated as a
principle in itself. The passing of the Welsh Intermediate Act in 1889 led
to the establishment of numbers of mixed secondary day schools. Bedales
School was founded as a boys’ school, and after seven years became co-
educational in 1900. In Scotland the co-education of boys and girls was
for centuries not uncommon in the burgh schools. In the eastern states of
America co-education became the rule. It was strengthened by the wide-
spread influence of Pestalozzi in America and his view that schools should
be established on the family model. It thus became general in the United
States, although there are boys’ public schools after the English pattern
such as Groton, and schools for girls such as Farringtons.
After the war of 1870 teachers from all over Germany met at Weimar to
demand education for girls, and in 1 872 there was founded an ‘Associa-
tion for the Higher Education of Women ’ which represented in education
the aims of the Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein founded in 1865. This
connection with the general movement for the emancipation of women
stepped up the agitation for girls’ schools. From 1888 to 1898 Helene
Lange was the leader of both movements. She put forward in 1887 a
scheme for the reform of girls’ education, and in 1 889 founded in Berlin a
Realkurse fur Frauen. In 1893 a ‘gymnasium’ for girls was founded in
Karlsruhe. In many states the high schools for boys were opened to girls
also, although for university education many women still went across the
border into Switzerland. Private enterprise as usual stirred the official
bodies to action, and in Baden and Bavaria the male heads of girls’ schools
were replaced by women who had qualified by passing the Abiturienten-
examen. The persistence of the connection of German education with
the Church was shown in 1902 when the Minister of Public Worship and
Education laid down the general principles of girls’ education — namely
those of the family and of the belief that women’s proper place is the home
and so no special training was needed. But this was met with opposition
from those who wanted equality with the men up to the university stage,
and in 1908 there was organised a system of girls’ schools beginning with
the Lyzeum for children of 9 to 16, followed by the Oberlyzeum giving
either a two-year general course or a four-year teacher training course for
teachers in elementary and lower secondary schools. At 1 3, however, girls
as well as boys who wanted a secondary school course could transfer to
the Studienanstalt, which provided three courses leading to the university,
namely classical, semi-classical and modem. It was noteworthy that the
Prussian government found itself unable to break with tradition in the
case of. boys’ education, but was quite ready to inaugurate far-reaching
reforms in the education of girls who were ‘politically negligible’.
In France it was not until 1867 under the influence of Victor Duruy that
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girls’ education was looked upon as at all important. Here again private
enterprise and agitation preceded state action and there was formed an
Association for Girls’ Secondary Education which organised secondary
courses for three years leading to a diploma. Some of these later became
colleges and even lycies. Camille See (1827-1919) reorganised girls’
education in 1877 and three years later state secondary schools were
established. Their fees were lower than those of boys’ schools and their
curriculum was entirely modem, with no Latin, and there was nothing
like the same overwork from which the boys’ schools suffered. As in
Germany male heads of girls’ schools were replaced by women, a contrast
to the situation in Switzerland where in spite of its reputation for demo-
cratic government all teachers in girls’ schools were males. The spirit of
the girls’ schools was much more free than that of the boys’ schools, and
the foundation of the normal school by See at Sevres in 1883 ensured a
high standard of work. The aim of girls’ education from 12 to 17 was
stated by Ernest Legouvd as Vegalite dans la difference, and it is interesting
to notice how this principle compares with that of Emily Davies.
In this period the Scandinavian countries became notable for their
development of education beyond school and college age. In the nature
of things adult education was concerned chiefly with the working classes
although its reference varied from country to country.
Denmark was first in the field. The work of Grundtvig (1783-1872) and
Kristen Kold (1816-70) in establishing the Danish folk high schools was
encouraged by the disastrous war of 1864 when Denmark lost the pro-
vinces of Schleswig-Holstein to Germany. Like Fichte after the battle
of Jena and Robert E. Lee after Appomattox and Victor Duruy after
Sedan, Grundtvig’s attitude was ‘What has been lost without must be
won within’. This was a call to advance in education. Denmark turned to
the folk high schools as nationalist institutions which no military defeat
could harm. The movement grew apace. The original school at Rodding
was moved across the new boundary line to Askov where it flourished
under Ludwig Schroeder. In return the effect of the schools on the
psychology of the people helped Denmark to recover from the next blow.
She had been a wheat-growing country and exported grain, chiefly to
England, but now the opening up of the vast wheat fields of Canada and
the Ukraine made it quite impossible for Denmark to compete in the
markets of the world. However, so much had the folk high schools
sharpened the intelligence of the peasant farmers that within ten years
Denmark had changed over from an economy based on wheat to an
economy based on dairy farming. The Askov school under Schroeder and
Paul le Cour combined an attachment to Norse mythology with an equal
concern for a model farm. After 1 876 the course was extended to two years
and after 1 885 it became co-educational. Its curriculum was very extensive,
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including physics, chemistry, agriculture, history, mythology, church history
and psychology. The city of Copenhagen began to take notice of the
movement and in 1890 opened a non-residential folk high school.
Meanwhile adult education was being developed on the strictly voca-
tional side. High schools for agricultural and other industrial workers
dated from 1867. The most notable of these were founded by the ‘Inner
Mission’ in the Lutheran Church and had among their adherents Soren
Kierkegaard. They got hold of the industrial workers who had been
hardly touched at all by Grundtvig.
The movement spread to all Scandinavian countries. Norway began to
establish folk high schools from 1864, which were Grundtvigian in
character, Christian, co-educational and almost entirely rural. In Sweden
the movement coincided with political movements for the extension of the
franchise, and became the concern of the Swedish Liberal party. The
schools in Sweden were more utilitarian, and the spiritual impulse of
Grundtvig was little felt. Swedish practicality showed itself in the ele-
mentary schools also, where manual training under the name of Sloyd
became an important part of the curriculum.
In Finland the Folk High School movement was, as in Denmark, part
of a nationalist movement. It was aimed against Russian influence and
helped to unite the working classes who spoke Finnish with the highly
cultured minority who spoke Swedish. Finland also followed Sweden in
developing ‘workers’ academies’, which were evening classes under the
municipal authorities, and were started in 1889.
A distinction has to be made here between ‘adult’ education and
‘further’ education. The second was an extension of schooling and it was
this type that appealed to the Germans. In Germany adult education was
concerned mainly with the technical side, although for the full develop-
ment of this type of education we had to wait until the present century
when Kerschensteiner’s continuation school at Munich became famous all
over Europe. Vocational adult education in Germany, as elsewhere,
gradually displaced apprenticeship, although in Germany guilds of ap-
prentices were formed the functions of which were laid down by a law of
1887. Among these was the fostering of good relations between employers
and employed. The special vocational schools that were established for
the chief industries were an addition to apprenticeship and not, as in
France, a substitute for it.
The great centre of adult technical education in Switzerland was
Zurich. The Confederation owned the Technical University and by the
Acts of 1884, 1885 and 1895 it gave federal aid to vocational education.
This included schools for music, art, silk weaving, veterinary studies,
training colleges for teachers, a school for artisans and a school of in-
dustry, and a highly specialised horological school at Geneva and one for
wood carving at Brienz.
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After the Civil War the Northern states of America developed into a
highly industrialised community. Hitherto agriculture had occupied the
attention of educationists and in 1862 the Federal government by the
Morrill Act had set up the ‘land grant’ colleges of agriculture in each
state. In 1865, however, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was
set up in recognition of the need for education in industry. It corre-
sponded in the New World to the Zurich Polytechnic in Europe. Never-
theless, vocational education was late in starting and it was not until after
the Spanish- American War of 1898 that any nation-wide effort was made,
and it was not until 1912 that a national commission on vocational
education was set up. This delay was partly due to the enormous influence
of John Dewey (1859-1952), who believed that no special schools were
needed, since every school should be a vocational school and thereby a
training ground for democracy.
The question of adult education on the cultural side was made acute in
the United States by reason of the emancipation of the Negroes, and by
the vast inflow of foreign immigrants, but the provision thus made was
strictly limited and utilitarian. The chief agency, however, of adult educa-
tion in America was the Church. The constitutional separation of Church
and state laid upon the churches a heavy but not unwelcome burden. All
sorts of voluntary societies were started, beginning with the Lyceum
lectures which after 1874 gave way to the Chatauqua. The first aim of these
institutions was to train Sunday-school teachers but they soon catered for
a wider public. Yet the fact that a very large proportion of Americans
attended some high school or college before settling down to business
made the appeal of adult education relatively slight.
In England the distinction between the vocational and the cultural side
of adult education became very pronounced in this period. The Livery
Companies of London in 1880 established the City and Guilds of London
Institute as an examining body to standardise technical education, with
Sir Philip Magnus as the head. In 1884 it established a college of its own
which became part of the University of London. Interest in technical
education produced some very strange bed-fellows. Ruskin, for instance,
was misled by the original Greek of the word ‘ technical ’ and believed that
he was supporting creative craftmanship when he lent his support to the
movement. The leaders were thinking very little about this but rather of
means to beat the Germans and the Americans in the world markets.
Adult education on the cultural side has always illustrated the fact that
it is the people who have had some education who most appreciate it and
want more. In England movements started primarily for working men
became attractive to clerks and teachers and apprentices, and when these
came in the working men went out. Nevertheless, Chartism, which was a
genuine working-men’s movement, was later associated with the Christian
Socialist Movement from which sprang the Working Men’s College in
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1854. This was the first contact between the older universities and adult
popular education and it attracted to itself a brilliant set of lecturers who
gave their services free. The Y.M.C.A. and the Royal Institution were
popular agencies of adult education, while all over the country were
Mutual Improvement Societies, sometimes run by the churches, some-
times independently.
The connection of university men with working-class movements was
shown again in the university extension movement started in Liverpool by
Miss A. J. Clough with James Stuart as the first lecturer. The weakness
was that the audiences were too large for discussion, but these defects
were remedied in the Workers’ Educational Association founded in 1903,
which was organised on a basis not of lectures but of ‘tutorial classes’.
The various university settlements in London were another outcome of
the very fruitful association of university men and working folk. The first
of these was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold Toynbee (1852-83), a
brilliant young Balliol don. Of a different kind of institution were the
polytechnics, of which the first was founded by Quintin Hogg in 1880 in
Regent Street. In its very first year it catered for 6800 members. In 1883
the Parochial Charities of London Act permitted some of the charitable
funds to be used for establishing polytechnics. One which benefited in this
way was the People’s Palace, which became the East London College and
still later Queen Mary College and part of the University of London.
Meanwhile the trade unions began to move on their own account. In
1899 they established in Oxford Ruskin College, which was intended to be
a training ground for trade-union leaders. Its settlement in Oxford was
significant. So too was the split ten years later which caused the Marxist
section to hive off and after a short time in Oxford to establish itself in
South Wales as the Central Labour College.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE ARMED FORCES
T he last thirty years of the nineteenth century were for the peoples
of western Europe, if not for those of the world as a whole, an
era of virtually unbroken peace. In western Europe there was an
interval between the Wars of Unification which had shattered the pattern
of the Vienna Settlement and the conflicts over the lands of the disintegrat-
ing Turkish empire which were to develop into the first World War. Even
outside this area there were only three instances where two major powers
were involved in mutual conflict — the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, the
Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Spanish- American War of 1898 — and
these quarrels, either by their nature or from the agreed policy of the great
powers, were kept strictly within local bounds. European powers pro-
tecting or extending their interests in Africa and Asia were constantly
engaged in minor conflicts, and Great Britain in 1899 became involved in
a struggle with the Boer Republics of South Africa which assumed propor-
tions transcending the category of ‘small wars’; but within Europe itself,
outside the Balkan Peninsula, the Peace of Frankfurt signed between
France and the victorious German empire in 1871 ushered in forty-three
years of uninterrupted peace.
Yet during these years the great powers, particularly those of Europe,
were preparing for war with a diligence for which modern history had
hitherto offered no parallel. Engines of war, maritime and military, were
multiplied prodigiously in number, complexity, and cost. Defence pre-
parations received an ever-swelling allocation in national budgets; and
the male populations of the mainland states of Europe became bound to
military service from the end of their adolescence until the onset of later
middle age. Since the preparations which each state made for its defence
were seen by its neighbours as a threat to their own security, the great
powers found themselves involved in an apparently inescapable competi-
tion which bore increasingly heavily upon public finance, inflamed mutual
fear and suspicion, and was to play a considerable part — many historians
would say the major part — in preparing the catastrophe of the first World
War.
The tensions which underlay the apparent peace of Europe during these
years had political, social and psychological causes which are considered
elsewhere in this volume. But in part at least they can be attributed to a
virtually autonomous and automatic development in weapons and tech-
niques of war which the industrial and scientific improvements of the age
for the first time rendered possible. Superiority in armament now gave to
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the nations which possessed it an overwhelming advantage. The collapse
of France in 1870, even more than that of Austria in 1866, made clear the
fate which lay in store for the powers which had not learned how to train
and deploy mass armies armed with modern weapons; and the states of
Europe were faced with the alternatives of acquiescing in the hegemony
which these techniques gave to the new German empire, or of acquiring
them themselves. An adequate defence system, in the new age, involved not
only the military training of the entire adult male population and the acqui-
sition of expensive and rapidly obsolescent weapons. It involved also
expenditure on strategic railways ; the accumulation of huge stocks of war
supplies; and the maintenance of a high birth-rate, of a high level of educa-
tion, and of an up-to-date industrial potential. Every state which wished
to safeguard its independence had to be, even during the time of pro-
foundest peace, a Nation in Arms, capable of deploying armies hundreds
of thousands strong within a matter of days, on pain of being itself caught
unprepared and totally overthrown.
Such a state of affairs was bound to instil into international relations an
element of tension and mistrust; and matters were made yet worse by the
speed of technological change which compelled governments to contem-
plate a total re-equipment of their armies on an average once every two
decades, and confronted navies with still vaster problems of expense.
Change on such a scale, moreover, brought all professional assessments of
strategy and tactics into question. An extensive literature, professional
and amateur, ranging from massive military dictionaries and multi-
volume studies through periodicals to innumerable occasional and quasi-
political pamphlets, came into being in which the changes brought about
in the art of war by each new political and technical development were
subjected to a continuous and microscopic examination. The General
Staffs of Europe created historical sections which published detailed
analyses of past and of contemporary wars; while their Intelligence and
Topographical departments compiled equally detailed accounts of the
resources and the forces of their potential allies and adversaries ; assisted
in the process by systems of espionage whose contribution, it may be
hazarded, was greater to imaginative literature and political causes
celebres than to the sum of real military knowledge. The eventual result of
their investigations was always the same: the need for greater military
expenditure. This, coming as it did at a time when pressure no less great
was building up on state budgets for expenditure on education and welfare
services, created new political tensions. The military ‘interest’ regarded
itself as responsible for the security of the state and chafed at the limita-
tions imposed on it by democratic control. The growing liberal and
socialist movements saw in this obsession with security and the consequent
competition in armaments an equally short-sighted ‘militarism’ which
coincided — in the central powers particularly — with the social position
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and political outlook of a military caste, to be combated not only by
representative assemblies but if need be by the weapon of the general
strike. In internal affairs no less than external the problems of defence
were to exacerbate the difficulties with which the states of Europe had to
contend.
During the period under review the conflicts of the powers of Europe
were still decisive for the destinies of the world; and since the military
preoccupations of these powers were predominantly concerned with land
rather than naval warfare, it is proposed here to reverse the customary
British order of priorities, and to deal with the former first. Until the last
decade of the century the problems of the creation, armament and deploy-
ment of armies obsessed the powers of Europe; only then were the
writings of Mahan to remind them that their destinies had been settled in
the past not simply by their ability to defend their frontiers, but also by
their ability to maintain those links with the outside world on which they
had for long relied for their wealth and on which they were rapidly
becoming dependent for their very existence. Until then Berlin, Vienna
and Paris set the fashion in military thought, and were uncritically copied
by such peripheral powers as Turkey, Japan, the United States and Great
Britain itself. Only as the century ended were naval rivalries to acquire
parity with military among the problems of European peace. Both were
to be considered together at the Hague Conference in 1899: but although
the nature and the gravity of the problem was apparent to the statesmen,
if not to the soldiers, of Europe by the turn of the century — as the sum-
moning of that conference bears witness — it was one beyond the power of
any of them to solve.
It was only to be expected that the technological revolution of the
nineteenth century should make itself felt as much in the military as in any
other sphere. Already by 1870 progress in metallurgy had made possible
the transformation of the smooth-bore muzzle-loading muskets and
artillery of the Napoleonic era, with ranges averaging 100 and 700 yards,
into the rifled breech-loading weapons, with ranges nearly ten times as
great, with which the contending forces were armed in the Franco-
Prussian War. The introduction of metal cartridges in the early 1870’s was
another considerable advance, as was found by the Turkish army which in
1877 was armed with them while the bulk of the Russian army was not;
but in the latter half of the century it was to be chemical discoveries,
perfecting ever more powerful explosives, which were to take pride of
place. The gunpowder traditionally used as a propellant, compounded of
saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, was a wasteful as well as an unpleasant
substance to use. Less than half of it was transformed into gas : the rest
remained as a thick deposit fouling the weapon or as a cloud of that dense
white smoke which had shrouded battlefields since firearms had first made
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their appearance five hundred years before. The greater rate of fire of
breech-loading weapons increased also, proportionately, the extent of
these disadvantages, and the potentialities of other forms of explosive
were therefore industriously explored. Alfred Nobel had perfected nitro-
glycerine in 1 86 1, but many years passed before it could be put to practical
military use. When it was, the transformation both of small-arms and of
artillery was as far-reaching as that effected by the introduction of rifling
forty years earlier. Combustion in the new explosives was virtually
complete : the explosion was in consequence more violent, and the smoke
produced negligible. Not only were ranges doubled but, since a greater
explosive capacity could be obtained from a lesser quantity of explosive
material, the size of the round, both small-arms and artillery, could be
reduced. So could the calibre of the weapon from which it was fired ; and
small-calibre weapons possessed not simply greater range and penetrative
power, but, thanks to the low trajectory of the projectile which the im-
proved propellant made possible, increased lethal effectiveness. Small-
calibre rifles firing cartridges charged with smokeless powder were, in
1898, considered lethal up to 4000 yards, while the introduction of
magazine-loading correspondingly improved their rate of fire. The French
army led the way with the Lebel rifle and ‘poudre B’ in 1886; Germany
and Austria followed in 1888 and within the next four years most of the
remaining European powers had followed suit.
The tactical effectiveness of the new weapons was so evident that for a
time it seemed as if the superiority of artillery over small-arms which the
Prussian gunners had demonstrated in 1870 had been decisively displaced.
The guns with which the Prussians had outshot the chassepots of the
French infantry at Sedan would have been at the mercy of riflemen armed
with the Lebel. But artillery was undergoing a simultaneous transforma-
tion. The debate over the respective merits of bronze and iron for the
manufacture of guns had been settled in favour of the latter, and later of
steel; in consequence they were now capable of standing up to a yet
greater explosive force. The muzzle velocity of guns, as of small-arms,
could therefore be increased by the introduction of smokeless powder and
by improvement in shell construction. Moreover, recoil-absorbing car-
riages made it possible to develop quick-firing guns which did not need to
be re-sighted after each shot, and by the end of the century field-guns were
in service in European armies with a maximum range of 9000 yards and an
effective range between 3000 and 6000. Yet even these ranges were
dwarfed by the development in siege artillery, in which Germany, anxious
for quick results in any future war, took the lead. By 1898 the armies of
Europe were armed with heavy guns, howitzers and mortars with a normal
range of 10 km.; and their melinite explosive content gave them a com-
parably increased penetrative power.
Improvement in small-arms made necessary improvement in guns;
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equally, improvement in guns demanded improvement in fortification.
The introduction of rifled guns in the 1850’s had already made it necessary
for fortresses to build outlying forts to carry on the fire-fight, as Issy,
Vanves and Montrouge had at Paris, and shield the fortress itself from
bombardment. But her forts did not save Paris from direct bombardment
by Krupps’ 21-cm. mortars in 1871. Forts had to be pushed ever farther
out from their parent fortress until by 1 898 a minimum diameter of 18 km.
for the fortress area was considered mandatory. Masonry everywhere
gave place to concrete. But even this gave inadequate protection; and
during the 1890’s military engineers throughout Europe, General Brial-
mont of Belgium at their head, were seeking new solutions to an appa-
rently insoluble problem. Brialmont himself urged the replacement of
fortresses by large fortified areas; there was increasing recourse to sub-
terranean works, and the development of the rising cupola made it pos-
sible for the entire fortification system to be placed underground. By the
turn of the century such historic fortresses as Antwerp, Verdun, Posen
and Lemberg were the centres of spider’s webs of works, to a great extent
subterranean and invisible, covering hundreds of square miles, and
making, for their construction and upkeep, ever heavier demands on
national budgets.
Yet the most famous defence of any fortress in the period under review
did not depend on complex and expensive permanent fortifications. In
1877 Osman Pasha barred the Russian advance into Bulgaria at Plevna
for five months by means of field-works dug on the spot ; and the casualties
which the Russians suffered in that assault — in one attack 18,000 out of
60,000 men — could not be entirely blamed on faulty leadership and tactics.
Plevna taught the Russian army that the effective answer to the breech-
loading rifle was the spade, and by the end of the war the whole of their
infantry carried entrenching tools. The other armies of Europe copied
them. By the end of the century it was accepted as normal that infantry
should entrench itself when in the defence, and it became usual for
infantrymen to carry not only a personal entrenching tool but picks and
shovels in large quantities as well. Artillerymen in their turn, seeing that
the Russians even with a fourfold superiority in guns had made no im-
pression on the earthworks of Plevna with high explosive shells, had to
devise means to ferret them out. If the spade was the answer to the rifle,
shrapnel, howitzers and mortars were the gunner’s answer to the spade.
But no artillery developments could counteract the enormous advantage
which spade and rifle gave to the infantry in defence — an advantage which
long antedated even the advent of Maxim’s belt-firing machine-gun, a
weapon whose high consumption of ammunition and early technical flaws
caused it to be viewed with mistrust by European armies until the advent
of the first World War. The difficulty of attacking infantry armed even
with the primitive breech-loaders of the 1860’s had perplexed tacticians
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and been made evident at such slaughters as Nachod and Gravelotte.
Now the destructive range was reckoned to be almost four times as great
as that of the chassepot, and infantry assaulting defensive positions, even
if it passed intact through the 3000 yard belt where shellfire was at its most
effective, had another 2000 yards to cross in which it would be mown down
by the rifles of an entrenched and invisible enemy. It was thus generally
agreed that no assault was possible until the assailants had gained fire
supremacy: as one tactician put it, ‘the infantry attack has become a
moving line of fire’. The skirmishing line which had been gaining in im-
portance over the attacking column since the Napoleonic wars had now
ousted it altogether in the text-books, as in 1866-70 it had in fact. To
sceptics who demanded whether entrenched infantry was ever likely to
be sufficiently worn down by the fire of opponents advancing in the open
to be vulnerable to an assault, two official answers were given. One was
that of the German infantry regulations, which saw the answer in an
approach so slow, patient and well prepared that it might occupy several
days and resemble rather a siege operation than a manoeuvre in the open
field. The other was that of the French, who were prepared to rely on the
traditional morale and dlan of their infantry to overcome all obstacles — a
view which the Russian army, under the influence of General Dragomiroff,
very largely shared. The French Regulations for Infantry of 1894 aban-
doned dispersed formations for the assault in favour of close lines of
companies marching elbow to elbow, on the grounds that only such
formations could maintain the morale of the assaulters and keep up an
adequate volume of fire. Thinkers such as Colonel Colin and General
Negrier who denounced these tactics as suicidal were persistently ignored,
and the French General Staff paid increasing attention to the sustaining of
morale to enable its forces to overcome the formidable obstacles which they
were likely to encounter in any future war.
Such lack of realism began to distinguish all armies during the 1890’s,
as the memories of 1870 and 1877 grew dim and the maintenance of
enthusiasm in a peacetime force demanded more attention to the ardent
and less to the discouraging aspects of war. Nowhere was it more appa-
rent than in the training of the cavalry. In some respects the new develop-
ments in weapons made the task of the cavalry more important, if more
arduous, than it had ever been before. As yet the internal combustion
engine was not sufficiently developed for application to military purposes,
and though other inventions were taken up and exploited with enthu-
siasm — every army had its bicycle and observation-balloon units, and the
successful experiments which the French army conducted with dirigible
balloons in 1884 pointed the way to a new category of developments
transcending any that had gone before — all were marginal in importance
compared with the cavalry as the indispensable mobile arm. Never had
the importance, and the difficulty, of liaison and reconnaissance been so
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great as on the wide battlefields of the new mass armies, and scientific
breeding was producing strains of bloodstock capable of an un-
precedented degree of exertion. But reconnaissance and liaison were
minor functions. The traditional tasks of the cavalry lay on the battle-
field: the charge which gave the coup de grace to shaken infantry, and the
pursuit which could turn retreat into rout ; and in spite of the massacres in
1870 at Morsbronn and Vionville and Floing, official cavalry doctrine
nowhere accepted the conclusion that there was no place for cavalry on a
battlefield dominated by modem firearms. The role of cavalry was con-
sidered to be basically the same as it had been in the days of Napoleon I.
In the German army cavalry regulations continued to be based on those of
Frederick the Great. It was argued that on the new battlefield the cavalry
could operate to far greater effect, since smokeless powder would enable
it to judge better when the enemy infantry was disintegrating and becom-
ing susceptible to the charge, besides adding to the moral effect of the
charge itself.
It is tempting to see in this obstinate adherence to invalid theories the
rationalisation of a social prejudice deeply rooted in the class structure of
nineteenth-century Europe. The emotional vested interests of the cavalry,
especially in the aristocratic-monarchical states of central Europe, were
undeniably powerful, and an attack on the effectiveness of cavalry on the
battlefield had implications which transcended the purely military sphere.
Yet apart from its role as an instrument of shock, there was no reason
to suppose that cavalry had outlived its usefulness. Not only were there
the greatly extended reconnaissance functions considered above, but the
possibility of deep cavalry raids to interrupt enemy communications on
the model of the great rides in the American War of Secession was widely
canvassed. In the Russian army the prospect of such raids assumed a
major part in the national strategy. It was hoped that by massing cavalry
units on the German and Austrian frontiers and launching them on mis-
sions of road, railway and telegraph destruction as soon as war broke out,
it would be possible to diminish the advantage which the central powers
gained by their more rapid mobilisation arrangements. Other armies
experimented with the restoration of cavalry to the status of mobile
infantry, for the conduct of outflanking attacks; and it was to facilitate
movements of this sort that the German army, in 1898, first armed
cavalry units with the machine-gun, considering it a mobile form of fire-
power for the attack rather than an additional source of strength for the
defence. But such experiments and speculations were eccentric and sus-
pect. Cavalry continued to dominate armies and manoeuvres, and no
orthodox thinker openly doubted that it would dominate the battlefield
as well.
The tactical lessons of the war of 1870 were thus only partially learned.
It was in the field of strategy and general military policy that the German
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victories made their most lasting impression. The most evident explana-
tion for the catastrophe to the French army had been its inability to
muster enough men in time — to oppose more than 240,000 to the 370,000
with which Moltke crossed the frontier during the first week of August.
The immediate cause of this was the technical inadequacy of the French
arrangements for mobilization and concentration — the recall and embodi-
ment of reservists and the dispatch of the complete formations to the
battle area. But the long-term cause lay in the superiority of the entire
Prussian system of military organisation — of universal short-term military
service over the long-serving professional army which had developed in
post-Napoleonic France. The French belief that quality counted more
than quantity, that a small but resolute force could defeat conscript
masses, was cruelly belied. So also was the creed of the French republi-
cans, that the ardour of an untrained People in Arms was in itself an
adequate defence. France after her defeat set herself to copy the institutions
of the victor as closely as possible, and the remaining powers of Europe
followed to a greater or lesser degree.
The importance of rapid mobilisation derived not only from the advisa-
bility of putting to immediate effect the trained manpower which con-
scription provided, in order to be able to strike — or to ward off — the first
and possibly lethal blow. It arose partly also from the nature of the battle-
field itself — from the difficulty of frontal attack, the need for outflanking
and envelopment and the consequent need for numbers to make this
possible. Even in the battles of 1870 victory had never been won by
frontal attack; it had been achieved by a numerically superior army
lapping round its opponent’s flanks. But such outflanking movements
demanded an elasticity of which European armies were decreasingly
capable. The development of railways had made it possible for forces of
unprecedented size to be brought to the battlefield, or to the concentration
area behind the battlefield. Once they were there, however, these forces
remained completely dependent on the railway for their supplies, and their
movements were limited, if not dictated, in consequence. The superior
mobility of the German railway system had been a powerful factor in her
victories in 1870, and it was clearly the disposition as well as the mileage of
a national railway system which would henceforth determine a nation’s
military effectiveness. The considerable development in the German rail-
ways running towards the Belgian frontier during the 1890’s — four lines
capable of handling three army corps — already gave the German General
Staff the capacity to undertake the violation of Belgian territory to avoid
a frontal attack on the frontier-fortresses of France.
The development of railways therefore was seen as a necessity for
national defence no less compelling than the development of modem
armament. As General Derrecagaix wrote in 1890 in La Guerre moderne
(1, 165), ‘the first care of a nation which has to organise the defence of its
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frontiers will not be to envelop itself with a girdle of fortresses, but to
cover its territory with a network of railways which will ensure the most
rapid possible concentration’; and General Bronsart von Schellendorff
declared in his book, The Duties of the General Staff, that it was one of the
primary duties of the General Staff ‘to examine, in peace, the precise
resources of the railway system of the country with a view to the concen-
tration of the army on the different frontiers, and carefully compare the
results obtained in each case with the facilities for concentration possessed
by the neighbouring country or countries’; ‘when any disadvantages of
this description had been recognised beforehand’, he added, ‘they may be
remedied by the simple process of extending the railway system at the
public expense’. Railway detachments became an intrinsic part of every
army; mixed civil/military commissions prepared the lines for military
use; and the movement of troops by rail became an exactly calculable
science. An army corps, for example, which was reckoned by the Germans
to need 1 17 trains to transport it with all its supplies, took eleven days to
dispatch along a single line and five days along a double and could move,
on a double-track railway, 900 km. in 9 days — a distance which would
have taken it two months to march. But the less the distance the smaller
was the advantage in using railways. To cover 1 12 km., for instance, took
8 days by railway and only 5 by road. Railways thus provided a strategic
rather than a tactical advantage — armoured trains were used in the
defence of Paris in 1870 and in the Boer War, without any great effect—
but this strategic importance was overwhelming. France and Austria
followed the lead set by the German empire in developing their networks;
between 1870 and 1913 French lines leading to their eastern frontier had
increased from three to ten, and the German lines leading to the west from
nine to sixteen; while on her eastern frontiers Germany and to a lesser
degree her Austrian ally developed a series of lines which the Russians
could not hope to match.
Russian backwardness in railway development was one of the main
problems which faced the Russian General Staff and that of their allies.
To mitigate it the Russians constructed their lines on a broader gauge
than those of Europe — 5 feet instead of 4 feet inches — so that her
adversaries would at least be unable to exploit her own network in the
event of an invasion ; but it was a precaution which recoiled on her own
head when she herself invaded Bulgaria in 1 877 and had to transfer all her
forces — 200,000 men and 1200 guns — to different rolling stock on arrival
at the Roumanian frontier. The inadequacy of the single-track Trans-
Siberian railway, constructed between 1891 and 1898, was to be made
evident in the Russo-Japanese War, at the outset of which only three
trains of sixty axles could run a day — and that at a maximum speed of
1 1 miles an hour — and it took 40 days to reach Mukden from Warsaw.
Yet the fact that the Russians were able to concentrate an army of a million
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men on their Pacific coast at all was something of a portent, and their
railway capacity was being zealously developed, with the aid of French
capital, up till the outbreak of the first World War. It was a development
which the German General Staff watched with the very gravest anxiety.
Railways thus provided one essential condition of victory in modem
war, but no less important was a smoothly organised mobilisation
machine. ‘In principle,’ to quote General Derrecagaix again (i, 363), ‘an
army which cannot be ready first cannot think of directing the war, but
only of suffering it.’ The problems of mobilisation were vast, and increased
with the size of war establishments. Mobilisation was no mere matter of
recalling reservists to their old regiments : it involved the creation of new
formations, of new administrative and medical services, of fully staffed
commands, and of a network of line-of-communication services which had
no peacetime existence at all. The method adopted by every state outside
Russia was that which Prussia had developed during the 1860’s — the
decentralisation of mobilisation, as of other administrative arrangements,
on to territorial commands, each of which was responsible for raising,
equipping and dispatching to the concentration area one army corps. In
each command lists of reservists were kept up to date and stocks of
clothing, equipment and ammunition were stored ready for use. Reservists
were summoned, either by personal telegram or by public announcement,
as soon as instructions came from the Ministry of War; and in the
Ministry the necessary telegrams lay ready, needing only the insertion of
a date to make them valid.
Thanks to constant improvement and practice the Germans reckoned
by the turn of the century that their forces would be ready to begin
hostilities in less than two weeks from the day that mobilisation began.
The French with their forces calculated approximately the same. Poorer
communications and administrative facilities hampered the states of
eastern Europe, and when Feldzeugmeister Beck became chief of the
Austrian General Staff in 1881 he found to his horror that whereas
German forces would be ready to march against Russia in 20 days, the
time needed for the Austrians was 45, so that ‘we will enter the theatre of
war as a sort of Reserve Army after a fait accompli I do not believe that
this would be in our political or military interests. If our army goes to war
it needs victories, and decisive victories ’ : and so effectively did he work
that by 1890 the time the Austrian army needed for concentration had
been reduced to 19 days.
This the Russians could not begin to match. Mobilisation itself, thanks
to the reforms which Milyutin introduced after the experiences of 1876-7,
they hoped to complete in 16 days, owing very largely to their maintenance
in peacetime of many of the headquarters and administrative units which
other states would have to create in the war. But the concentration of
their forces, the transportation of units from the Urals and the Ukraine
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and Siberia and the Caucasus over their inadequate railway system, was
another matter altogether; and the handicap which Russia suffered
thereby could be counterbalanced only by the maintenance of a large
permanent covering force on her western frontiers. In 1893, according to
one calculation, Russia had 442,293 men concentrated in Poland, inclu-
ding a large force of cavalry ready to raid deep into Prussia, Silesia and
Galicia: nearly half her total peacetime strength. Yet the maintenance of
this covering force slowed down mobilisation and concentration arrange-
ment yet further. The defence of the frontiers could not be entrusted to
troops recruited from the unreliable Polish frontier provinces : the covering
force had to consist of regiments from the interior, whose reservists in the
event of mobilisation would take weeks to join them; while Polish units,
employed on garrison duties within Russia where they could do no harm,
suffered from the same drawback. Under such circumstances the decen-
tralisation of mobilisation arrangements to area commands was out of the
question, and in Russia alone among the major powers of Europe the
Ministry of War retained detailed responsibility for mobilising the army —
an arrangement which did not in itself make for speed.
Austria-Hungary, a multi-racial empire riddled with nationalist dis-
content, was liable to suffer even more seriously than Russia from the
‘territorialisation’ of its army. But in the interests of speedy mobilisation
this was a risk which Beck was prepared to run. The army attempted to
remain, as it had in the days of Radetzky, an institution above race, with
a depay se officer corps and a uniform German Dienstsprache ; but the
recognition in army documents of eleven other tongues gives an alarming
indication of the complexity of ad minis tration within the Kaiserliche und
Konigliche Heer. It was hoped that the homogeneous corps of Czechs,
Ruthenians, Italians, Croats and Galicians would become impregnated
with the schwarz-gelb spirit of the army; but although in the regular cadres
this hope was to a large extent fulfilled, it could not apply to conscripts
and reservists who rejoined the colours after a stretch of civil life; and once
the cadres were swept away in the early battles of the first World War
the full unreliability of the units which remained stood revealed. In this
respect as in many others — the fostering of universal education and the
increase in state medical services, for example — military requirements
played a leading part in breaking down that old pattern of society which
paradoxically enough the military castes more than any other element felt
pledged to defend.
Conscription itself had been denounced by Thiers as ‘putting a rifle on
the shoulder of every socialist’; but after 1870 the military necessity of
the measure seemed so self-evident that that objection was overruled. The
German pattern of conscription was taken as a model by all continental
powers, and the legislation of the Second Reich was itself modelled on
that introduced in Prussia by Boyen in 1814 and into the North German
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Federation by Roon in 1867. Every German was, by Article 57 of the
Reich Constitution, made liable to service from the age of twenty, for
three years with the colours and four with the reserve; and then with the
Landwehr — a body which since 1862 had been so closely integrated with
the regular army as to form a regular second-line reserve — until the age of
thirty-nine. But this apparently inescapable obligation was softened by
concessions to non-military considerations. In the first place, the interests
of the professional and wealthy classes were safeguarded by the institution
of ‘one-year volunteers’ — also a legacy from the Wars of Liberation.
Young men who had attained a certain educational standard and who
were able to provide their own equipment and uniform served only for a
year under exceptionally easy conditions, and then qualified as officers in
the Landwehr or reserve. A reserve commission, in the Second Reich,
became an indispensable passport to social acceptability. Secondly, an
upper limit to the size of the army was set by the Reichstag’s budgetary
control — and a political storm invariably broke when it came up for
reconsideration. Finally, the Ministry of War had, in a society in which
socialism was rapidly spreading, to weigh the military desirability of a
numerically strong army against the political need to ensure that that
army should consist only of politically reliable elements. Thus the Ministry
of War was selective in the demands it made on the different districts of
the Reich; and within those districts mixed civil-military commissions
selected recruits on a basis of ‘worth, fitness and civilian circumstances’.
Austria-Hungary followed the Prussian example by introducing com-
pulsory universal service in 1868, in a law drafted by the victor of
Custozza, Archduke Albert, who was to guide the destinies of the army
until 1894. There also service with the colours was for three years, with
consequent service in the reserve or the Landwehr. There also the upper
limit was set by the legislature, conscripts were selected by mixed local
commissions, and the educated and wealthy could serve as one-year
volunteers. Certain landowners indeed, farming their own estates, were
exempted from service altogether, as were schoolmasters and seminarists.
But conscription found out the weaknesses of the Austro-Hungarian state.
It was difficult to enforce on the Ruthenian and Transylvanian peasantry,
many of whom were anyhow emigrating in increasing numbers; while
even by the end of the century the proportion of conscripts found fit for
service was little more than a quarter. In Russia the same problems were
even more acute. There universal service on the German model had been
introduced as part of Milyutin’s widespread army reforms in 1874, service
being for five years with the colours and thirteen with the reserve; but it
was applied only with considerable modifications to the Cossacks and the
Finns, and not at all in Transcaucasia, Turkestan, and several other
districts where local susceptibilities were accounted too tender. Moreover,
family considerations were given far greater attention than in western
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Europe in the selection of conscripts — a vital matter in a nation of
peasants working their own land. Finally, the German ‘ one-year volun-
teer’ system was adopted in an extended form, students being exempted
from military service in proportion to their educational attainments.
Every European power indeed reckoned that an educated and satisfied
professional class was at least as necessary an element to the welfare of the
state as was a large army; and found its own compromise in order to
preserve both.
The French also, in their military reforms of 1 872-3, hastened to imitate
their victors, instituting universal service without substitution, and adopt-
ing the system of one-year volunteers. But the traditionalists were still
strong enough to prevent a total renunciation of the pattern of a long-
serving professional army and an unequivocal acceptance of the German
conception of the Nation in Arms. Long service was still held to be
necessary, both to fashion true soldiers and to create a body which could
be relied on in face of the ever threatening pdril intdrieur. A compromise
measure was adopted, whereby part of the annual contingents served for
five years, and the rest was called up for six to twelve months ; the distinc-
tion being made partly on compassionate grounds and partly by lot. Only
the short-service troops were organised on a regional basis, after the
Prussian pattern: the rest of the army was kept depay sd — and indeed the
exigencies of African service made it virtually impossible to avoid this.
Those who secured exemption from conscription altogether— and budget-
ary stringency made this at times a quarter of the annual contingent —
received no training, though some form of organisation for them was
several times projected. Even the organisation and the training of the
territorial army had to wait until Charles de Freycinet took over the
Ministry of War between 1889 and 1893. Such inequality of service was
under constant attack from the more radical republicans, who objected to
a measure which not only preserved an armde au coup d'etat but which
exempted clergy and theological students from service altogether. In 1889
a project to equalise service on a three-year basis was voted by the
Chamber of Deputies but was mutilated by the Senate; and it was not
until 1905 that the republicans, as part of their general assault on the
citadels of reaction whose power had been made so evident during the
Dreyfus affair, drove through a law enforcing universal service without
exemptions for two years. The example of the Germans was powerful, who
had introduced two-year service eight years earlier, in 1893 ; in the interests
neither of equality nor of humanitarianism, but simply to increase the rate
of training of their manpower in face of the combined Franco-Russian
threat which had crystallised the year before. In face of such a menace
from beyond the Rhine the soldiers acquiesced; but many grumbled with
General Gallifet that it was plain that France wanted neither a Church nor
an army
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Thanks to the adoption of conscription by all the major powers of
Europe, with the' exception only of Great Britain, the number of trained
men available for service steadily rose. In 1874 Germany had a regular
army 420,000 strong and a war establishment of 1,300,000: in 1897 the
regular army had increased only by a third, to 545,000, but the war
establishment, at 3,400,000, had nearly trebled. Within the same period
the French war establishment increased from 1,750,000 to 3,500,000; the
Austrian from 1,137,000 to 2,600,000; and the Russian from 1,700,000 to
4,000,000; while Russia’s mobilisation difficulties led her to keep under
arms a regular army of about a milli on men. Altogether, the number of
men which the great powers of Europe could put into the field increased
during this period by nearly ten million, and it was evident that any future
conflict would be on a scale so gigantic that, problems of strategy apart, it
was doubtful whether any power would be able to stand up to the sheer
economic strain of keeping such forces in the field. This was one reason
the more that set Count Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff
from 1891 to 1905, searching for a war plan which would avoid the long
attrition of frontal attack and secure that rapid victory which alone could
avert internal collapse.
In organisation, as in armament, the European armies grew to resemble
each other more closely as the conduct of military affairs approximated
more and more to an exact science. The protagonists of tradition scored
some successes in their fight against scientific uniformity: German
cavalry adopted the lance as a universal weapon; the French infantry
retained their historic red trousers; but there was an ever-widening gap
between the dazzling differences which European armies displayed in their
parade uniforms and the drab anonymity to which they were compelled by
necessity of war. In hierarchical organisation the differences were ones of
detail. Everywhere the army corps, some 30,000 fighting men strong, was
the smallest unit self-sufficient in all arms and ancillary services; and its
size was definitely limited by the impossibility of deploying a larger number
of men on the head of a column in the course of a single day. In most
European states, as we have seen, the army corps was linked to a definite
territorial area from which it drew all recruits and reservists. The corps
commander was thus not only responsible for the organisation and con-
duct of the units under his command, but he had also (except in Russia
and Great Britain) considerable responsibility for the administration of
military policy in time of peace and for the carrying out of mobilisation on
the outbreak of war. A typical corps would consist of two infantry
divisions, each containing one cavalry and two infantry brigades — which
themselves were composed of two regiments — and a regiment of field
artillery; with, under direct corps command, a regiment of heavy artillery.
Armament by the turn of the century was equally uniform, infantry being
armed with 8 or 9 mm. magazine-rifles, field artillery with 8 cm. steel
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guns, and the siege and heavy artillery with guns, mortars and howitzers
15 cm. and 21 cm. in calibre. Under corps also came engineering and
supply services, constantly increasing in complexity; medical services;
telegraph units; railway detachments responsible not only for the main-
tenance of existing lines but for the creation of new ones — particularly
necessary for a campaign in Poland; balloon detachments, cyclists, bridge
trains, and the huge ad mi nistrative services needed to keep armies of such
size in the field.
In the control and administration of these great organisms there was
little room for the untrained amateur. Staff work became more exacting
and laborious, as much in the administration and training of the army in
peacetime as in its conduct in war. The German General Staff, with its
orderly subdivisions, its stereotyped yet flexible procedure, its control
over military training and its omnipotent Chief became a model for other
armies to follow. The Chief of the General Staff everywhere became an
influential figure — though rarely did he achieve the stature of the great
von Moltke. In Russia the Staff remained subordinate to the Ministry of
War; in Austria-Hungary the activity and strong views of the Archduke
Albert limited the scope of such Chiefs as Beck, and it was only after the
death of that prince that a strong Chief, Conrad von Hotzendorf, was able
to assert his supremacy. In France the post was until 1888 a political
appointment changing with the Ministry and was in any case linked not
to the command of the armies in the field but to the Ministry of War;
while in England the post was not created until after the Esher reforms of
1904. Everywhere, however, the prestige and importance of General
Staffs increased; and everywhere the military education of officers received
a growing amount of attention. Military academies and staff colleges had
existed, though they had rarely flourished, long before 1870. The Maria
Theresa Academy in Austria, the Nicholas General Staff Academy in
St Petersburg, the Staff College at Camberley, all existed side by side with
the Prussian War Academy, and training colleges for the officers of the
different arms were numerous. But after 1870 the lackadaisical atmo-
sphere which had characterised these institutions in the first part of the
century disappeared: entrance requirements became higher, syllabuses
fuller, competition more intense. The army became a profession as well as
a vocation ; the officer less of a knight, more of an engineer.
The growing size of the armies of Europe meant that officers could no
longer be drawn entirely from the upper classes which in the eighteenth
century had virtually monopolised commissioned rank. In Russia less
than anywhere was this possible: the bulk of the officers for her great
standing army had to be drawn from the Junkers — cadets normally pro-
moted from the ranks — whose level of education and social standing was
far below that of the graduates from cadet schools whose ambition was a
commission in the Imperial Guards. The same distinction was apparent in
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the French army, where the upper classes had had no monopoly of com-
missioned rank since the Revolution. After 1815 the aristocracy had
turned away from the military career, and only during the regime of the
Second Empire did they begin to turn back. Under the Third Republic the
French officer corps became increasingly aristocratic and bien pensant in
character as members of the upper classes were driven from their estates
by the agrarian depression of the i87o’s and found that entry into other
professions — civil service, law, politics — was barred by the prejudice or
the policy of the new republican masters of France. Thus the French
army came to acquire, between 1880 and 1900, many of those character-
istics of an aristocratic caste, socially if not politically oriented, which
the Prussian officer corps had always possessed and which it was now
struggling hard to retain.
In Germany, as the army expanded, men of the middle classes had to be
admitted in growing numbers, not merely to the specialist arms or as
officers of the reserve, but to the regular army itself. In 1890 William II
openly appealed to the Adel der Gesinnung, the nobility of temperament,
to come forward to help the nobility of birth to supply the army with its
officers. The results were not so disastrous as the conservatives feared.
Not only did the middle-class recruits bring a new degree of military
efficiency, but they aped the manners and outlook of the gentry with
whom it was now their privilege to consort. The works of Sybel, Treitschke
and Bemhardi, the proud traditions of 1870, all made it easier for the
German middle classes to accept a degree of militarisation unthinkable
before i860. As for the Austrians, the problems raised for the army by
expansion were ones of nationality rather than of class. Of the four
traditional bulwarks of the Habsburg monarchy — Church, nobility,
bureaucracy and army — the effectiveness of the first two steadily waned as
the century drew to its close, and the importance of the army in con-
sequence increased. Its officers were repeatedly reminded of their special
position above class and nationality, as the immediate supporters of the
imperial throne; and within their ranks a camaraderie existed which con-
trasted sharply with the rigid subordination characteristic of the German
army. But all three empires of Europe — Russia, Austria and Germany —
shared this common characteristic in their military policy : conscription,
by bringing the mass of the population under the control and instruction
of a loyal officer corps, could be used as an instrument to combat the
growth of democracy and radicalism which threatened the very founda-
tions on which their social structure was based. And in France, where
there was no monarchy to enshrine the ideals of order, tradition and
hierarchy, the army felt an even greater obligation to guard them itself.
Thus although military leaders — except perhaps in Spain and Latin
America, where military pronunciamentos had shaped national destinies
since the collapse of the Spanish empire — everywhere professed their
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indifference to and dislike of politics, pressure on them to enter the
political arena was considerable. The growth of dissident nationalism in
Austria-Hungary, of social democracy in Germany, of radical republi-
canism in France, all had repercussions within the ranks of the armies, and
military leaders appeared to have good professional reasons — in addition,
often, to strong personal inclinations — to throw the full weight of their
influence against them. In Russia the situation was exceptional. There
a substantial element of the General Staff threw in its lot with the liberal,
‘Westernising’ elements which were pressing for greater industrialisation,
universal education and all the social and economic changes necessary if
they were to have literate recruits, adequate armaments and railways.
Such military liberalism is not unusual in industrially backward states
whose military efficiency depends on the rapidity of technical and educa-
tional development: Turkey and the successor states to the Ottoman
empire were to show much the same tendencies during the following
century; and even within Germany a division grew, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, between the General Staff which had committed itself
to Schlieffen’s conception of an army numbered in millions, with all its
social and economic consequences, and the Imperial Military Cabinet,
which as the body responsible for appointments and promotions wished
to keep the army, so far as was possible, to a size which could be officered
in the main by nobility and the old regular N.C.O’s.
In France and Germany the object of the military leaders was not so
much to interfere in politics as to ensure that politicians did not meddle in
military affairs. In part this was the reluctance of specialists to have their
provisions questioned by amateurs. When in 1874 the Reichstag attempted
to reduce or vary the size of the army demanded by the government
von Moltke warned them that ‘through fluctuations in this figure you
bring uncertainty into all the many comprehensive preparations which
must be made long in advance and worked out to the last detail’. Every-
where, as on the one hand technical developments increased the cost of an
efficient weapons-system and, on the other, universal suffrage brought into
power governments pledged to greater expenditure on education and the
social services, the conflicts within National Assemblies and cabinets grew
sharper. In 1887 Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag rather than yield to
its demands that the size of the army should be debated, not every seven
years, but every three; and in 1894 the swollen Naval Estimates played a
substantial part in causing the collapse of Gladstone’s last cabinet.
The size and equipment of the armed forces was only one of the points
of issue between the civil and the military. In an increasingly liberal
society the whole apparatus of military justice, subordination and disci-
pline came under searching criticism and attack. In Germany the attempts
of the officer corps to maintain old Prussian traditions of Kadaverge-
horsamkeit in a mass army, and the military arrogance which, under the
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patronage of William II, spread beyond the ranks of the regular army to
infect every bourgeois reservist who could sport a uniform, awoke violent
reactions in socialist and liberal circles, as the files of such satirical
journals as Simplicissimus clearly show. The mounting anti-military
feeling in the Reichstag led the German army to seek to withdraw military
matters from parliamentary control altogether by subtracting the most
important parts of its administration from the control of the Minister of
War — the only official whom the Reichstag could hold responsible for the
conduct of military affairs. Such attempts to evade control were all the
easier, since in Germany — as indeed in Austria, Russia and, to a con-
siderable extent, Great Britain — the armed forces were still felt to be the
peculiar province of the Crown, to be kept intact and apart from the
democratic influence which was invading other areas of society. The
emperor in Germany controlled military appointments through his own
military cabinet, the emperor of Austria through his military chancery,
and their Chiefs of Staff were directly responsible to them. Officers stood
to their sovereign in a special relationship of quasi-feudal loyalty very
different from the normal obedience owed by the citizen to the head of the
state. Interference with the internal affairs of the armed forces was thus
held to be as sacrilegious as interference in affairs of the royal household —
of which the army was virtually an extension.
It is, however, hard to avoid the conclusion that loyalty was as much a
cover as a reason for the esprit de corps of the armies of Europe. In the
French army, there was no focus for such loyalty. There was simply
hierarchical obedience to the Minister of War who, himself a soldier
although of political appointment, sat in the Ministry more as the
ambassador of the army than as an instrument of democratic control.
Yet the esprit de corps of the French army yielded nothing to that of the
German or the Austrian. Perhaps even more than these did it pride itself
on its purity from the defiling spirit of the age. After 1870 there had been a
long honeymoon period when the French middle classes and peasantry
looked on the army, not only as the predestined instrument of national
revenge but as the palladium of social order ; while a substantial propor-
tion of French thinkers and statesmen saw in it the school which might
teach the nation the moral virtues of patriotism, self sacrifice and respect
for authority which the collapse of 1870 had revealed it so conspicuously
to lack. The military prints of Detaille commanded wide sales, popular
songs feted the army, and when the unfortunate General Boulanger found
himself cast in the role of national saviour his supporters came at least as
much from the left wing, where Deroulede and the ‘Ligue des Patriotes’
kept Jacobin military traditions aflame, as they did from the royalists
and dissident conservatives on the right. But by the end of the i88o’s the
honeymoon was drawing to a close. There was a wave of anti-military
literature ; Detaille gave way to Caran d’Ache, and the imperfections of
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the army began to come under the close examination of hostile and
intelligent eyes. Like their German colleagues the French military leaders
considered such criticism to be not merely ill-informed, but positively
harmful to national security and morale; and when rumours began to
circulate about the circumstances in which Captain Dreyfus had been
condemned for espionage in 1894, their first reaction was to declare it to
be a purely internal matter, their second to resist any attempt at re-
examining the case, and their third to conclude that, since the reputation
of the army now depended on Dreyfus’ guilt and national security rested
on the reputation of the army, neither perjury nor forgery should be
disdained in establishing that guilt as certain.
Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of the Dreyfus affair was not so
much the lengths to which the French army was prepared to go to main-
tain its independence and national prestige, as the degree of public sup-
port which it retained in doing so. The affaire split society from top to
bottom, and anti-Dreyfusards were to be found in all walks of life and of
most shades of political opinion. The army was a national symbol which
must be held sacred at all costs. In Germany such a feeling was even more
intense; in Austria-Hungary and Russia it was qualified only by a yet
greater degree of loyalty evoked by the persons of the emperor and the
tsar; while in Great Britain the Royal Navy by the end of the century had
become surrounded by publicists with an intensity of emotional fervour
which would have been unthinkable some thirty years earlier. To examine
the causes of this heightening of the emotional attachment in European
states towards the symbols and instruments of national sovereignty — the
flags, the armed forces, the sovereigns themselves — would be to trespass
far beyond the bounds of this chapter. Here it must suffice to note that
military — and naval — leaders did not represent simply a professional
group-interest in their struggles for larger forces and for the autonomous
conduct of those forces : in their role as the guardians of national security
they could command a degree of public support which was sometimes
denied to the civil leaders with whom they contended ; and there can be
little doubt that the consciousness of such support provided an additional
incentive for the more able among them — Waldersee in Germany, Fisher
in Great Britain, Conrad in Austria, Skobolev in Russia — to attempt to
influence national policy.
The influence of the military on internal policy was always likely to be
marginal. Too many other interests, social, cultural and economic, had
to be taken into account. But in the shaping of foreign policy careful
attention had to be given to the considerations urged by naval and
military advisers as the minimum requirements of security. The terms of
the Peace of Frankfurt were to a large extent shaped by the insistence of
Moltke and the General Staff on possessing the two fortresses of Metz and
Strassburg, and only with some reluctance did they forgo the possession
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of Belfort as well. British naval and military advisers were so insistent in
their demands for overseas bases to protect supply lines that Lord
Salisbury declared that ‘ if they were allowed full scope they would insist
on the importance of the moon to protect us from Mars’. From demands
for the acquisition of protective bases it was easy to pass to demands for
the waging of preventive war. Two of the most notorious examples of
this — Fisher’s unofficial suggestion of the ‘Copenhagening’ of the Ger-
man Fleet, and the steady pressure exercised on the Austrian government
by Conrad von Hotzendorf for the elimination of Serbia — lie outside our
field of study. The activities of the Austrian and German military authori-
ties with regard to Russia, however, lie very definitely within it.
Like Bismarck in the diplomatic field, Moltke, who remained Chief of
the German General Staff until 1888, was far more conscious of the weak-
ness of the new German empire than of its strength. He watched the
revival of French military strength with concern, and that concern was
intensified when in 1876-8 France covered her north-eastern frontiers with
a great belt of fortifications which apparently made impossible any repeti-
tion of the rapid victory of 1870. For Moltke was equally concerned
about the prospects of war with Russia, and with the growing military
effectiveness of that power as Milyutin’s reforms made their effects felt.
A war on two fronts only promised success if a rapid victory could be
expected on one of them; and since the French fortifications seemed to
destroy all hope of this in the west, Moltke resolved to stand on the
defensive there in his newly won territory west of the Rhine and turn his
attention to the eastern front. This decision coincided not only with the
conclusion of the Dual Alliance between the German and Austro-
Hungarian empires in 1879, but with the Russian decision, after the
revelation of the imperfections in her mobilisation plans in 1876-7, to
maintain on foot in her western military areas a force which the German
and Austrian staffs calculated at 600,000 men. Such an adversary could
be dealt with only jointly, and in 1882 planning between the two staffs
began without the formal authorisation of either government. Moltke
indeed, when asked what the attitude of Bismarck might be to these con-
versations, proudly replied : ‘ My position is such that I do not depend on
the Foreign Office.’ By 1887, when the growing tension in the Balkans
had culminated in the Bulgarian crisis, the probability of war seemed so
great that to the staffs of Germany and Austria safety seemed to lie only
in attacking first, and Waldersee, Moltke’s assistant and successor,
drafted with Beck a military convention whereby a preventive attack was
to be launched against Russia in 1888. This was too much even for
Moltke. Bismarck had decisively to intervene and disown the impatient
soldiers. But he shortly had to deal with an impatient emperor as well : for
in 1889 William II, shaking himself free of Bismarck’s restraint, promised
Beck ‘for whatever reason you mobilise, whether Bulgaria or not, the
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day of your mobilisation is also the day of the mobilisation of my army,
and the Chancellor can say what he will’. A year later the Chancellor
had gone, and the soldiers in Vienna openly expressed their satisfaction.
It was premature. In 1891 Waldersee himself was displaced, and his
successor, Schlieffen, soon abandoned his policy. Redeployment of
Russian forces and the strengthening of fortifications on the Narew and
the Niemen made a rapid victory on that front seem equally improbable ;
Schlieffen in any case mistrusted the capacity of the Austrian army to
fulfil its part in any agreed strategy; and before the century ended he had
turned his attention back to the western front and begun to draft the
famous projects for a great sweep through Belgium, outflanking the
French army and fortifications alike, which were to culminate in the
notorious Aufmarsch of 1914.
Throughout the last quarter of the century German military planners
worked on the assumption that France and Russia would be allies in any
future war. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the man who reversed
Bismarck’s pacific policy by allowing the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia
to lapse, the Count Caprivi, should have been a professional soldier. In
any case it was only after Bismarck’s retirement that the Franco-Russian
Entente which he had dreaded and which the General Staff accepted as
inevitable took shape, and then it originated as a military convention. It
was an agreement which was brought about by several factors other than
common fear of Germany. Hostility to Great Britain was also a powerful
cause, and it was natural enough for Russia to look to France for the
capital and the industrial aid which she needed to develop her railways
and military resources and which Germany was increasingly unwilling to
provide. The civil authorities of both states — Giers in Russia, Ribot and
Freycinet in France — showed themselves reluctant to enter into any
specific military agreements. French statesmen were as averse to going to
war over Constantinople as were the Russians over Alsace-Lorraine. But
during the exploratory conversations which General de Boisdeffre, Vice-
Chief of the French General Staff, held with his Russian opposite number
during the goodwill visit of the French Fleet to Kronstadt in 1891, it
became clear that nothing less than instantaneous mobilisation in mutual
support could have any military value. The French knew that they could
not sustain the onslaught of the entire German army unless the Russians
created an immediate diversion; the Russians were no less anxious about
the exposed position of their forward troops in Poland against which
Austria and Germany, thanks to their superior railway facilities, would be
able to concentrate overwhelmingly superior forces; and in 1892 the
military specialists, with the powerful support of Tsar Alexander HI,
overruled civilian hesitations and signed a Convention, whereby the two
powers agreed not only to support each other in the event of a German
attack on either party, but to mobilise in the event of a mobilisation by
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any member of the Triple Alliance. Ratification of the Convention still
hung fire until the following year; but then the German introduction of
two-year military service, and the consequent increase in the trained man-
power of that nation, was enough to quell the last doubts.
So far we have confined our attention to the affairs of Europe, for in
spite of their increasing interest in and dependence on the world overseas
the military policy and organisation of the powers was at this epoch
contrived to meet purely European threats. The central powers, with the
exception of a small section of the German army equipped for operations
in Africa, could devote their military energies entirely to planning for
European war. But the colonial empires of the western seaboard, France,
Spain, and above all Great Britain, had to plan for other military con-
tingencies than invasion by a neighbour. Their widespread commitments
overseas involved them in frontier wars against adversaries who, though
usually in a pre-industrial stage of civilisation, showed qualities of skill
and courage sufficient to impose a considerable strain on the limited
forces available to deal with them — a strain greatly increased as modem
rifles became available in the markets of the world. In South Africa
indeed, in 1881 and 1899, the British found in the Boer Republics an
enemy whose skill and equipment were initially superior to their own ; and
in 1898 the United States, emerging from their isolation to contest the
European monopoly of imperial pretensions, introduced a new element
into world politics: a fully industrialised extra-European power.
The defence of overseas territories involved more than the protection
or extension of frontiers: it was necessary also to pacify the territories
within these frontiers, and this could be done only where military repression
was accompanied by enlightened administration and profound measures
of social and economic reform. Thus there are two archetypal military
figures of the late nineteenth century. One is the European staff officer,
skilled in the complexities of weapon development, supply, railway move-
ments, and the administration of large units. The other is the soldier-
administrator, the Kitchener or the Lyautey, solitary, many-sided, con-
cerned with civil as much as with military organisation, with the admini-
stration of justice as much as with the elimination of opposition, imperial
pro-consuls of the classic type. Units of the British and French armies
serving overseas — and indeed those of the Russian armies in the Caucasus
and central Asia — were employed on projects of building, improvement
of communications, and famine relief which were military only in the very
widest sense of the word. Within the French army, in Indo-China, Mada-
gascar and Morocco, such highly literate commanders as Gallieni and
Lyautey developed a military doctrine whereby the methods of conquest
were dictated less by military considerations than by the subsequent needs
of pacification and administration; and in the British army the same
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doctrine, if nowhere so precisely formulated, was in practice usually put
into effect.
For the armies of the mainland powers, even that of France, colonial
campaigning was a comparatively minor consideration in comparison
with the need to guarantee the homeland against invasion by a European
neighbour. For Great Britain on the other hand such campaigning was
the army’s raison d'etre: and for a force which was constantly scattered in
garrisons over the face of the globe the principle of short-term military
service adopted by all other major European powers was of doubtful rele-
vance, even if it had been politically feasible — which in mid-Victorian
England it was not. Nevertheless, the impact of the Prussian victories of
1866 and 1870 was felt in Great Britain as elsewhere in Europe, and it
hastened a movement of military reform which was already well under
way. Ever since the fiasco of the Crimean campaign fifteen years earlier
the worst anomalies of an army in which eighteenth-century principles of
military organisation had remained intact were being slowly eliminated ;
and the process was speeded up when in 1868 Edward Cardwell brought
to the War Office that zeal for economy and reform with which Glad-
stone’s ministry was transforming the entire administration, judicature
and educational system of England. In his quest for efficiency and eco-
nomy Cardwell had to demolish two pillars of the old order: the
dichotomy whereby control of the army was divided between a royal
Commander-in-Chief responsible to the sovereign and a Secretary of State
for War responsible to parliament; and the purchase system, which en-
sured that control of the armed forces remained in the hands of the pro-
pertied classes. These anomalies, justifiable only in terms of the problems
and passions of a bygone age, were duly eliminated. The status of the
Commander-in-Chief was reduced to that of ‘Military Adviser to the
Secretary of State’; and Cardwell was able to override parliamentary
protests at the abolition of purchase by the argument that the matter was
one solely within the jurisdiction of the Crown, and so carry the reform
through by use of royal warrant. In addition the army itself was reshaped.
The growing ease and rapidity of ocean transport made it no longer
necessary to keep large garrisons locked up for years in overseas stations,
while the larger overseas settlements — Australia, New Zealand, Canada
and South Africa — were able to provide for their own defence. By
reducing the number of troops stationed abroad Cardwell was able to
build up cadres at home which, established in depots in each of sixty-six
newly created military districts, both acted as sister-battalions to units
serving overseas and supervised the training of the forces of the local
militia; while the latter were removed from the control of the Lords
Lieutenant, who had exercised it ever since the Restoration, and came once
more under that of the Crown. Cardwell thus introduced a modified form
of the German ‘ Corps Area ’ in so far as every army unit was linked to a
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territorial district from which it drew recruits, regular reinforcements and
trained reserves. Reduction in length of overseas duty made it possible
also to introduce a modified form of continental short service, and the
Army Enlistment Act of 1870 enabled recruits to enlist for twelve years
only — six with the colours, six with the reserve. And, for the first time, the
army became selective in the men it chose. Bounties on enlistment were
abolished; men of bad character were discharged ; and under the influence
of its last two Commanders-in-Chief, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Sir
Frederick Roberts, the British army devoted an increasing amount of
attention to the comfort, welfare and education of its men. Army and
nation could not, in the absence of conscription, become identified to the
same extent as in continental powers; but the soldier was no longer a
social pariah bound for life to a trade which civilians at once neglected
and despised; and by the end of the century, assisted by the activities of
writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Spenser Wilkinson and Sir Charles
Dilke, the British army was acquiring an unprecedented measure of
popular affection and respect.
There was, however, a great deal of room for further reform. The office
of the Commander-in-Chief was quite unable to handle the complex
problems of military administration which on the Continent were the con-
cern of the growing General Staff's. In 1888 a commission under Lord
Hartington recommended the abolition of the office altogether, and its
replacement by an Army Council on the lines of the Board of Admiralty
and by a Chief of Staff on the German model. Queen Victoria was out-
raged by this ‘really abominable’ report, and its recommendations were
crippled by compromises. Not until after the Boer War were they given
effect; and the Boer War showed other weaknesses as well which urgently
needed remedy. Cardwell’s army was organised to provide a constant
stream of reinforcements for imperial garrisons, a force for home defence,
and a small strategic reserve. It could not provide a large force, ready
organised with supplies, staff and services, to take part in a prolonged over-
seas campaign against a ‘civilised’ enemy. All this had to be improvised;
and by 1901 it was clear that if the British army was to be an effective
instrument of national policy administrative reforms were still necessary
at least as sweeping as any made by Cardwell. Nor were the needed
reforms purely ones of administration. The tactics, training, and standard
of professional leadership in the army were shown by the ten months of
campaigning between October 1899 and August 1900 to be entirely in-
adequate to the requirements of modern war; while the many problems,
naval as well as military, involved in the redeployment of the imperial
forces necessary to conduct a distant campaign made evident the need for
some central planning organisation whose scope would transcend the
purely military and deal with the long-term problems of imperial defence.
The need for such a body had been frequently felt, and stressed, during the
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previous quarter of the century. The Hartington Commission had recom-
mended the establishment of a joint naval and military council under the
presidency of the Prime Minister, and Lord Salisbury established a
Defence Committee of the Cabinet in 1895; but it was only in 1902 that a
specific Committee of Imperial Defence was constituted, whose task it was
to ‘survey as a whole the strategical military needs of the Empire’, and
whose membership, apart from the Prime Minister and the Secretariat, was
to be kept so fluid that not only naval and military experts but specialists in
the economic, financial, diplomatic and political fields might be summoned
as occasion required. For a power with commitments so widespread as
Great Britain’s, in an age when conflicts were to be on a global scale, such
a body was as vital to military planning as was, on the smaller scale of
European warfare, the German Great General Staff.
For Britain, naturally enough, war was visualised primarily in naval
terms. Indeed it is tempting for the historian — especially a British
historian — to condemn the parochialism of the continental strategists
whose vision was limited to the exploits of a Napoleon or a Moltke and
who gave no consideration whatever to the part played in warfare by com-
mand of the sea; but it is a judgement which a nation with no vulnerable
land frontiers cannot justly make. For Britain, among the powers of
Europe, naval affairs were vital; for France and Italy they were secondary;
for Germany and Russia they were marginal. The naval superiority of the
French postponed defeat in 1870, but could not avert it. Yet by the turn
of the century the problems of naval armament and warfare were arousing
concern even among the continental states of Europe and in the principal
extra-European powers, the United States of America and Japan ; and it is
to the technical and political problems involved in this form of defence
that our attention must now be turned.
In 1870 the revolution in shipbuilding brought about by the introduc-
tion of steam and iron and by developments in the science of gun-making
had already effected its most sweeping changes. Since the middle of the
1850’s steam had replaced sail as the principal means of propulsion for
men-of-war, and the indispensability of armour, evident enough since the
destruction of the wooden Turkish Fleet by Russian shells at Sinope in
1853, had been placed beyond doubt by the exploits of the Confederate
iron-clad Merrimac in Hampton Roads in March 1862, when only the
providential appearance of the Federal Monitor had saved the Union
Fleet from destruction by gunfire and ram. The iron-clad steamer,
pioneered so boldly by Napoleon III and Dupuy de Lome when they
launched the Gloire and her sister-ships in 1859, had come to stay, and the
vessels which had fought at Trafalgar were, as one Victorian publicist put
it, ‘as out of date as the trireme’. Only two more steps were needed to
complete the breach with the past: the abandonment of wood as the
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prime material for naval construction, and the abandonment even of
auxiliary sail. Britain had already taken the first step. Iron had its dis-
advantages, especially for long voyages — iron bottoms fouled more easily
than copper-sheathed wood. But it made possible the construction of
vessels of far greater size; and, for an industrial nation, it was cheap. Iron
was indigenous to England and wood in adequate quantities was not. In
the Warrior of 1859 Britain launched her first iron-built man-of-war.
Italy followed in 1861 and Russia in 1864, but France was slower to
abandon the iron-clad wooden vessels which she had introduced and
which served her more limited purposes quite adequately. Not till 1872,
in her first post-war naval construction programme, did she also adopt
iron as the material at once most economical and giving the greatest scope
for increase in size. Thereafter wood was virtually abandoned by Euro-
pean naval architects, and the growing metallurgical industries of the
Continent throve on shipbuilding contracts.
The second step, and one no less far-reaching in its effects, was taken by
the British Admiralty after the catastrophe of 8 September 1870, when the
full-rigged iron-clad steamer Captain capsized and sank with nearly all
her crew. There was an understandable reluctance on the part of all
navies to abandon sail, with all the inestimable increment it provided in
cruising capacity; but the preservation of full-rig was not compatible with
the other considerations which were affecting naval construction. Of these,
the chief was the need to present the smallest possible targets to the
powerful new guns of the enemy, and in consequence the reduction of
freeboard to the minimum above the water-line. It was this combination
of low freeboard — a bare six feet — with full-rigged masts that caused the
disaster to the Captain. But low freeboard meant also the abandonment
of the traditional broadside of guns — a step to which two other factors
contributed. One was the desire to mount guns capable of firing forward
over the bows as the vessel charged and rammed her adversary. It was
generally accepted that the new possibilities of controlled movement
opened up by the replacement of sail by steam would result in naval battles
being fought at close quarters, with ramming and perhaps boarding; as
the Merrimac had rammed its victims at Hampton Roads and the
Austrian admiral Tegetthoff had the Italian flagship at the battle of Lissa
in 1866; two actions whose results determined naval thinking for the best
part of fifty years. Thus the ram and the forward-firing battery became
essential parts of naval armament. The second factor was the increase in
the size and weight of naval ordnance. From five tons the weight of naval
guns had increased, by the 1870’s, to eighty. Increased explosive charges
first made necessary a great strengthening of the breech; then slow-
burning powders were introduced which needed a greater length of barrel
to develop their full explosive power — a development which forced the
British Admiralty to abandon the muzzle-loaders to which they clung
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until 1880. Such monsters could only be mounted centrally; and the old
gun-port gave way to the turret, the central battery, or the barbette.
Thus the iron-clad of the 1870’s took the form of an armoured platform,
low in the water, from which rose the heavily armoured central battery
containing the heavy guns, surrounded by unarmoured quarters for the
crew. Such were the Devastation and the Inflexible in England, the
Redoutable in France, the Duilio in Italy. But these vessels had their
disadvantages. With all the guns concentrated in one area of the ship the
smoke of one blinded all; and as the penetrating power of the shells
increased, it became impossible adequately to armour all the vital points —
in particular the water-line and the central battery. The vitals of the
Inflexible of 1874, for example, had to be protected by up to 24 inches of
iron armour-plating. The French abandoned the central battery altogether,
and in the Amiral Duperre of 1876 they armoured only the water-line and
mounted their guns on barbettes fore and aft. The British were not
prepared to follow in a course which seemed ruthlessly to sacrifice protec-
tion of the crew to the protection of the vessel. Science soon came to their
rescue. Harvey in America and Bessemer in England were perfecting new
processes of chilling and hardening steel, and during the i88o’s a new form
of armour-plating became available, light, thin and tough, which made
possible not only the abandonment of the massive iron strait-jackets to
which the vessels of the 1870’s were condemned but the armouring of
cruisers, which no longer needed to sacrifice protection to speed. With the
Royal Sovereign of 1890 and the Majestic of 1895 the British Navy
returned to high freeboard, with all the improvements which that meant
in comfort and speed; and foreign naval architects rapidly did the same.
The central battery finally disappeared, and the heavy guns in their turret
mountings were reinforced by the smaller, quick-firing 12-, 6- and
3-pounder guns down to machine-guns devised by Hotchkiss and Norden-
feldt. By the turn of the century battleships were some 14,000 to 15,000
tons in displacement; capable of steaming at 18 knots; and mounting
12- or 13-inch guns with a muzzle velocity of something over 2000 feet per
second.
It was evident that battles between these great gun-carriers would
differ in kind as well as in degree from those fought between the men-of-
war of Nelson’s day. Then the chances of wind and weather might favour
a skilfully handled weaker fleet. By keeping to windward and shooting
down the enemy’s rigging, as the French had learnt to do in the eighteenth
century, one might cripple a stronger adversary and escape unscathed.
But now against more powerful engines and bigger guns neither luck nor
seamanship could provide salvation. The weaker fleet, once located, could
not even keep the seas; and once guns developed an effective range of
4000 yards or so it could no longer compensate for its weakness by pro-
voking a melee. In 1894 the Japanese defeated a numerically superior
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Chinese fleet off the Yalu through gunfire alone, never closing to ram or
board, and four years later American squadrons at Manila and Santiago
were to drive the same lesson home. The faster, better-armoured, more
powerfully gunned and better-drilled vessels would win. In land warfare,
the outcome of future battles seemed to lie in long-prepared conscription
policies and mobilisation plans ; in naval warfare supremacy was seen to
rest more and more in the hands of designers and naval construction
engineers. Fear of activity in French and Russian shipyards drove on the
British. Fear of German and Italian activity drove on the French. Fear
of being outclassed in power and prestige drove on the Americans and the
Japanese. Spurred by rival national policies, the size of the battleship and
its guns steadily grew.
Yet there were other weapons being developed by naval designers as
well as the battleship. Moored explosive mines had been used effectively
by the Russians during the Crimean War, and ten years after the conclu-
sion of that conflict Arthur Whitehead patented the first of his automobile
torpedoes. The first models were slow, erratic, limited in range and exceed-
ingly difficult to launch; but by 1877 the Russians were able to use them
effectively against stationary Turkish ships, and torpedo warfare rapidly
became a new and important part of the naval repertoire. Torpedo-boats
not only became an intrinsic part of coastal defence, making any close
blockade doubtfully possible, but they added another element to the
naval battle. They were visualised as a sort of maritime cavalry. ‘It is not
likely’, wrote a British specialist, H. W. Wilson, in Ironclads in Action
(1898), ‘that torpedo boats will be sent against intact battleships, whose
quick-firers are in good order and whose gunners are unshaken. The boats’
time will come towards the close of the battle, when the fighting has left
great masses of iron wreckage; when the targets have lost their power of
movement; when their crews are diminished in number and wearied by
the intense strain of action. ’ By the end of the century certainly doubts
were growing about the ability of these craft to penetrate the curtain of
fire with which it was believed that battleships could surround themselves,
especially now that ships were no longer swathed in the thick cloud of old-
fashioned gunpowder smoke; but already in the submarine a craft was
being developed which might more safely take their place.
Like so many other military innovations, the submarine in its origins
dated back to the American War of Secession ; but the primitive models
then employed, with indifferent success, had since been improved, first by
Holland’s invention in 1877 of the horizontal rudder, which made possible
the controlled dive, and secondly by the development of the accumulator
battery which made it possible to store electrical power. The French navy
acted as pioneers in this as in most other major naval developments of the
age. By 1899 they had developed, in the Gustave Zede, a vessel capable of
8 knots at a depth of 60 feet; perhaps the first submarine to be practicable
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as a weapon of war. Two years later, by placing an order for twenty-three
of these vessels, in addition to her existing eight, France made herself
stronger in them than all the remaining powers combined. In 1901 the
British Admiralty tentatively commissioned five, stating in their memo-
randum on the Estimates, ‘what the future value of these boats may be in
naval warfare can only be a matter of conjecture’. It was to be five years
before the German navy took any steps to follow. With some reason
Admiral Sir John Fisher was to write in 1904: ‘It is astounding to me,
perfectly astounding, how the very best among us fail to realise the vast
impending revolution in naval warfare and naval strategy that the sub-
marine will accomplish. ’
It was no accident that submarine warfare should have been first
developed by the French. In the French navy the memory of the guerre de
course waged by their great corsairs upon English trade during the wars of
Louis XIV had never faded; and in the eyes of some of their theorists the
naval and economic developments of the nineteenth century gave their
seamen the opportunity, if they could but grasp it, of surpassing the
achievements of Duguay-Trouin and Jean-Bart. Great Britain, pointed
out the spokesman of this Jeune tcole, was now as never before dependent
on her overseas trade not only for her livelihood but for her very existence;
its interruption would cause not only commercial panic and industrial un-
employment, but starvation. Even the limited activities of Confederate
commerce raiders in the American War of Secession had shown how much
could be achieved by a few daring and well-found vessels. Now the age of
steam gave the commerce raider a new advantage. Limitations of fuel
meant that merchantmen were to be found along a few well-frequented
shipping lanes instead of being able to cruise safely in the immensity of the
ocean ; while armed cruisers could be constructed of a speed with which
laden merchant vessels could never hope to compete. Such writers as
Gabriel Charmes, writing in the 1880’s, urged that Britain’s command of
the seas was a thing of the past. Torpedo-boats would make her weapon of
close blockade unusable, while such damage could be inflicted on her
merchant shipping by armed commerce raiders, striking if need be with no
consideration for existing rules of war, that she could quickly be brought
to her knees. ‘Others may protest; for ourselves we accept in these new
methods of destruction the development of that law of progress in which
we have a firm faith, and the final result would be to put an end to
war altogether.’ Thus, with fashionable Darwinism, wrote Admiral
Th^ophile Aube, who at the Ministry of Marine during the 1880’s was
able to put much of the teaching of the Jeune Ecole into effect. The French
navy began to concentrate on torpedo-boat and cruiser warfare, and
greeted with enthusiasm the potentialities of the submarine. In the
Gustave Zede lay the answer to Fashoda; and at least one enthusiast,
d’Armor, in his book Les Sous-marins et la guerre contre U Angleterre
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(1899), urged that France should abandon battleship construction al-
together, rely on armoured cruisers for the destruction of enemy com-
merce and on submarines for the elimination of the enemy fleet.
But the Jeune £cole did not get its way entirely even in France. The
French Ministry of Marine accepted the cruiser, the torpedo-boat and the
submarine as auxiliaries to the battleship, but never as substitutes. When
in 1900 it adopted a seven-year programme for building six 15,000-ton
battleships and five 12,500-ton armoured cruisers, the explanation of the
Minister relied on the orthodox argument which British naval thinkers
had never abandoned. It was above all necessary, he declared, to float the
most powerful possible gun. This could be done only on a large and stable
platform; and when to this platform was added the necessary qualities of
armour and speed, the result was the battleship. Comparative naval
strength was ultimately calculated in terms of ships of the line.
Certainly the British thought in these terms when, during the 1880’s,
they became aware of the inadequacy of their naval power if their two
principal rivals, France and Russia, should ever join forces. If the German
General Staff was haunted by calculations of the combined French and
Russian manpower, British naval thinkers were no less worried by the sum
of French and Russian ships. Not only was friction with both these
powers increasing throughout the decade, as Britain came in repeated con-
flict with them in Africa and Asia, but the Bulgarian crisis of 1885, over
which war seemed a distinct possibility, revealed that the Royal Navy’s
mobilisation and training arrangements were as inadequate as was its
striking power. A campaign in press and parliament culminated in the
official adoption of the Two-Power Standard. The Royal Navy was to be
kept at a strength in battleships equivalent to that of the combined fleets
of the next two major naval powers. It was to implement this policy that
the Naval Defence Act was passed in 1889 — a step which set on foot an
armaments race of an entirely new intensity. Britain committed herself to
a naval construction programme, costing £21-5 million and involving the
construction within the next three years of ten battleships — eight of them
of the new Royal Sovereign class, over 14,000 tons burden — together with
nine large cruisers and thirty-three smaller ones, to deal with the vessels of
the Jeune £cole. This was only the beginning. The twin goads of Franco-
Russian competition — seen as particularly menacing after the fulsome
demonstrations of naval amity between these two powers in 1891 — and
the rapid obsolescence of naval units, forced the British to visualise the
construction of forty-two battleships and forty-five armoured cruisers by
1904, and to lay down, between 1893 and 1904, an average of seven
capital ships a year. Conservatives, Radicals, Liberal Imperialists co-
operated, under the stimulus of the newly founded Navy League, in
forcing the pace. Only Mr Gladstone declared that the demands of the
Admiralty were ‘ mad ! mad ! mad ! ’ and he resigned rather than endorse a
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policy which he considered fatal to the interests both of economy and of
peace.
The logic of technical development and the fears bred by traditional
colonial rivalries were thus in themselves enough to account for the naval
race with which the twentieth century began. The race involved more than
merely ships. The abandonment of sail even as auxiliary motive power
reduced all vessels to complete dependence on the availability of coaling
stations at sufficiently frequent intervals along their routes ; and for men-
of-war more than fuel would be necessary if they were to be, and remain,
fit for action in distant waters. They would need ammunition and food
supplies, dockyard facilities, naval barracks and hospitals ; all the facilities
of a complete naval base. Thus if governments were to give their commerce
the protection to which it was traditionally entitled they needed to estab-
lish naval bases all over the world from which this could be done. Those
bases would themselves need protection ; so would the lines of communica-
tion connecting them; and yet more vessels and expenditure would be
required. Thus the demand for naval expansion came not only from the
military circles concerned with questions of security; it was swollen also
by the multiple commercial and financial interests of western Europe and
the United States which were dependent on the survival and expansion of
a prosperous world trade; and the great shipbuilding, metallurgical and
armaments industries which boomed on government contracts would have
shown a degree of saintly unworldliness if they had not added their moral
and financial support to Navy Leagues which were founded throughout
Europe and America to agitate for the continuation and increase of a
policy which was not only vital for the protection of national interests but
highly profitable in itself.
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau crystallised and expressed the general revolt
of sensibility and individualism against the formalism of the eighteenth
century, so did this new ‘navalism’ find its apostle in the person of
Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan of the United States Navy. In 1890
Mahan published the lectures on the Influence of Sea Power on History
which he had given at the United States Naval College. For the most part
these consisted of a close analysis of the tactics and strategy of naval war-
fare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but they contained
generalisations about the nature and constituent elements of sea-power
and the relationship of sea-power to national prosperity which summed
up all that the ‘Navalists’ were coming to believe. ‘For the first time’,
wrote Sir Julian Corbett, ‘naval history was placed on a philosophical
basis.’ Such a judgement does less than justice to the thinking going on in
Corbett’s own country, especially that of Rear Admiral Philip Colomb,
whose great analytic work on Naval Warfare appeared at the same time as
Mahan’s masterpiece. But Mahan’s pronouncements had a magisterial
and convincing ring which made them quotable — and translatable — in a
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way that Colomb’s careful technicalities were not; and in a series of books
and articles he continued, until his death in 1914, to expound a coherent
teaching about naval power and policy which became accepted doctrine
for every naval power in the world. Sea-power, commerce and colonies,
he maintained, all these were inseparably connected, and they were the
indispensable foundations for national wealth and prosperity. ‘In these
three things’, he wrote, ‘production, with the necessity of exchanging
products, shipping, whereby the exchange is carried on, and colonies,
which facilitate and enlarge the operations of shipping and tend to protect
it by multiplying points of safety — is to be found a key to much of the
history, as well as of the policy, of nations bordering on the sea.’ More-
over, sea-power not only protected commerce; it derived strength from it.
Sea-power, he wrote, ‘includes not only the military strength afloat, that
rules the sea or any part of it by force of arms, but also the peaceful com-
merce and shipping from which alone a military fleet naturally and
healthfully springs, and on which its security rests’. Without commerce,
no navy; without a navy, no commerce. And commerce and navy both
needed overseas bases. ‘ Control of the seas ... is the chief among the
merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations’, wrote
Mahan in 1893. ‘ . . .From this necessarily follows the principle that, as
subsidiary to such control, it is imperative to take possession, when it can
be done righteously, of such maritime positions as contribute to secure
command.’
Mahan’s teaching rather gave emphasis to existing policies than created
new ones. The Jeune Ecole was already in decline when his critiques of
the whole policy of guerre de course appeared, and the scramble for over-
seas bases was well under way. He could only urge his own countrymen
to join in. The United States, he maintained, must occupy, first, positions
which would give them control over the Panamanian isthmus, through
which commercial and strategic considerations were making it imperative
that a canal should soon be built; and secondly, bases in the Pacific to
protect United States interests in the Far East, where the old rivals,
Britain, France and Russia, were joined by three new expanding and
mutually suspicious powers, Japan, Germany and the United States: all
countries whose rulers were fervent disciples of Mahan.
Germany’s advent as a great naval power involved a complete break
with her national tradition. Individual German vessels or squadrons had
been showing the imperial flag and protecting commerce ever since the
foundation of the Reich: at Haiti in 1872, to exact compensation for
damage to German traders ; in the China seas in 1876, in a joint demarche
with the other European powers to suppress piracy; at Angra Pequena in
1883, and Zanzibar in 1885. But these activities were marginal to German
naval policy. Ever since its foundation by Albrecht von Roon in 1867, the
German Navy had been a step-child of the War Office, administered by
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soldiers who, efficiently though they cared for their charge, regarded its
function as being primarily to free the army from the obligations of coastal
defence. Apart from the unarmoured corvettes and gunboats allotted to
trade protection, and a handful of iron-clad frigates, the German fleet
consisted primarily of a force of torpedo-boats and coastal craft — and one
sufficiently formidable to alarm the French, against whose coasts and
harbours it was quite capable of being used in time of war. This was the
strait-jacket imposed by Bismarck’s policy of limited liability in foreign
affairs, and one which began during the 1880’s to chafe. Already in 1884
a memorandum from the Ministry of Marine to the Reichstag complained
that the unarmoured vessels on which Germany relied for trade protection
would be valueless in war time ; and such an argument appealed to those
growing commercial and industrial classes whose representatives in the
Reichstag grudged, as much from political as from economic motives, the
increasingly vast sums gobbled up by the Ministry of War. A great navy
could not only gain for Germany the place in the world to which her
industry, talents and destiny entitled her; it would do so without in-
creasing the influence of the Junkers who still monopolised more than
their share of power. Bismarck’s fall removed the main obstacle to a
navalist policy in Germany. It was significant that the new emperor
should have inaugurated the new era with the creation of an independent
Admiralty and with a naval metaphor: ‘The ship’s orders remain the
same: full steam ahead!’
William II was not the man to be left behind by the latest developments
in world thought. He ‘devoured’ Mahan, and had translations placed
aboard every vessel in the German navy; and in 1892 he gave to his Chief
of Naval Staff, Admiral von Tirpitz, the right of direct access already
enjoyed by his principal military adviser. Tirpitz had risen to eminence
as a torpedo-boat commander, but in his view the German Navy had a
part to play far more significant than that of purely coastal defence.
‘National world commerce,’ he wrote in 1894, ‘world industry, and to a
certain extent fishing on the high seas, world intercourse and colonies are
impossible without a fleet capable of taking the offensive.’ Not only that:
Tirpitz went a step beyond Mahan, and saw the value of a strong ‘fleet in
being’ even in peacetime, to add strength and meaning to diplomatic
negotiations — an argument which particularly appealed to his emperor.
But a strong fleet meant battleships, and battleships in sufficient quantity
— if they were to be used other than purely defensively — to make an
impression on the British. It was to meet this last point that Tirpitz
developed his celebrated ‘risk’ theory. The German fleet should be at
least strong enough to be able, if it clashed with the British, to inflict such
damage that the Royal Navy would no longer be able to hold its own
against its French and Russian rivals. The risk involved in trying conclu-
sions with the German Navy would thus deter the British from attacking
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it as effectively as would any vast increase in size. It was a bid for sea-
power on the cheap, and Tirpitz’s measures when he became Minister of
Marine, 1897, were relatively modest: the construction of seven new
battleships — largely explicable as replacements of obsolete units — to bring
the German total to nineteen.
Even the first Navy Law of 1898 could be seen as a measure of rational-
isation and standardisation as much as one of expansion, fixing the
strength of the navy at nineteen battleships and twelve large cruisers and
setting an upper limit on expenditure. But two years later the tone had
changed. Tirpitz found himself out-distanced by the enthusiasm of his
emperor and of the Flottenverein which he had done so much to found.
Great Britain no longer appeared a naval power of such strength that she
could be dealt with only on a basis of risks and balances. The Boer War
revealed not only her military inadequacies but her diplomatic isolation;
and impressive as had been the Jubilee review of the Fleet at Spithead in
1897, it was evident that British overseas commitments were so extensive
that it was by no means unthinkable for the German navy to achieve
parity with the force left available to the Royal Navy in home waters. The
opening of the Kiel Canal in 1896 had significantly increased German
potential strength in the North Sea, and new large docks were under con-
struction at Emden and Wilhelmshaven. The Navy Law of 1900 provided
for the doubling of the number of capital ships in the German navy; and
when concessions had to be made to protests in the Reichstag against the
increase in expenditure involved, it was not capital ships but cruisers which
were thrown to the wolves. The twentieth century thus opened with the
German decision to construct a formidable fighting fleet, and the British
could not for long avoid the conclusion that it was directed primarily
against them.
The United States, unlike Germany, did not feel it necessary to adopt
British naval strength as an exact criterion in assessing the optimum size
for their fleet. But, like the German, American naval policy had by the
end of the century swung far away from the simple reliance on coastal
fortifications and commerce-raiding which had characterised it since the
War of Secession, and come into line with the doctrines so pertinaciously
spread in public and in private by Captain Mahan. Until the 1880’s the
United States felt no need or impulse to join in the expensive competition
in ironclads which obsessed the powers of Europe. Absence of overseas
interests, reliance on the isolating power of distance, obsession with
internal affairs, all contributed to arrest American naval development.
Until 1883 the United States navy consisted of wooden vessels; even the
three steel ships laid down that year were commerce-raiding cruisers
carrying full rig. That so cautious a policy was inadequate even for the
barest needs of defence became obvious when the republics of South
America began to acquire modern vessels from European shipyards which
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could blow the whole United States fleet out of the water. The Americans
began to experiment cautiously with battleship construction; and in 1889
the Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin F. Tracy, boldly set a new course.
The defence of American coasts, he declared in his Annual Report of that
year, could be undertaken only by vessels capable of defeating the enemy
on the high seas. ‘To meet the attack of ironclads, ironclads are indis-
pensable’, he claimed. ‘The country needs a navy that will exempt it from
war, but the only navy that will accomplish this is a navy that can wage
war.’ Such a force he estimated at twenty battleships and forty modem
cruisers. The demand was too extreme for Congress, and Tracy got only
three battleships. But it was a beginning. Next year The Influence of Sea
Power was published, and the arguments which had already won over the
Navy Department quickly converted the industrialists who would receive
the government contracts, the businessmen opening up markets in the
Far East, and a general public becoming conscious of America’s manifest
destiny as a great power. Tracy’s successor, Hilary Herbert, laid it down
that the navy must be kept ‘in such a condition of efficiency as to give
weight and power to whatever policy it may be thought wise on the part of
our government to assume’. That policy could not be purely defensive.
The navy must ‘afford unquestionable protection to our citizens in foreign
lands, render efficient aid to our diplomacy, and maintain under all
circumstances our national honour’. Under such pressure Congressional
hesitancy evaporated. The conflict with Spain, brief as it was, provided the
final incentive. In 1898 the United States navy possessed five battleships;
in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House, it had a
total, afloat or building, of seventeen.
A powerful fleet and a thriving commerce were two elements in Mahan’s
trinity. Overseas bases was the third; and Mahan, as we have seen,
turned the attention of his countrymen to two areas where such bases
should be established: the Caribbean, to guard Atlantic commerce, and
the Pacific, to protect the growing intercourse with China and Japan; and,
by natural progression, to the isthmus between the two seas — a passage
through would not only increase the potentialities of American commerce,
but would ease the difficulty of protecting it. Now in both of these areas
the American eye encountered the spectacle of a European power in
decay, slothfully misgoverning the last relics of a once great empire. The
Cuban revolt against Spanish rule was a matter almost of domestic con-
cern to the United States, and the mysterious destruction of U.S.S. Maine
in Havana harbour in February 1898 only provided the occasion for a
conflict into which the United States government was swept by an over-
whelming clamour of public opinion. The Americans could hardly have
found a better adversary on whom to cut their teeth. The Spanish navy
had one battleship to the United States’ five; its vessels were dilapidated
and its crews untrained. Dewey annihilated the Pacific fleet at Manila on
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i May, Sampson the Atlantic fleet at Santiago on 3 July, and the capture
of the Philippines and Cuba, their garrisons isolated from their homeland
and their native populations in revolt, followed as a matter of course.
Mahan’s doctrines of sea-power seemed most triumphantly justified.
But the Spanish-American War was not entirely a matter of naval con-
flict. A landing in Cuba was planned and, after a fashion, executed, and
the problems of organisation and fighting which this involved made it
clear to the Americans, as similar problems in the Boer War were to make
it clear to the British a year later, that if conflicts were to be pressed
through to final victory sea-power by itself was not enough. In 1898 the
United States army was as ill-equipped to wage war as the navy had been
ten years before. Its 28,000 men were scattered throughout the land in
small detachments which never came together for training. The National
Guard provided another 1 14,000 men, and guarded its independence from
the regular army with a jealousy which reacted sadly on its military
effectiveness. Volunteers brought the total number of men which the war
department had to administer to 225,000, and its complete inability to
feed, clothe, or house them adequately caused even greater public con-
cern than did the failure of the forces which did land in Cuba to force the
Spanish lines before Santiago. In July 1899 Elihu Root became Secretary
of War, with the task of straightening out the confusion and ensuring that
it did not recur; and in his first Annual Report he sketched out the lines
on which the army must be reorganised. 28,000 men would no longer
suffice for America’s new colonial responsibilities. Her peacetime
strength must be increased to 100,000, and all steps must be taken to
render this force capable of immediate expansion in time of war. Root
demanded for the United States all the military institutions now so long
familiar in Europe: an expanded War Department, a General Staff, a
National War College, and a system of trained reserves. It was a pro-
gramme popular neither with the old regular army which it was to trans-
form nor with the legislature which was to pay the bill; but during the first
years of the new century, the American people gradually reconciled them-
selves to its necessity. America, no less than the powers of Europe, had to
transform itself into a Nation in Arms.
So also had the emerging Asiatic power of Japan. Imitation of western
military and naval patterns was a major element in the process by which
the Japanese, awakened from their isolation, were fitting themselves to
compete as equals with the states of Europe. In 1866 the Sho-gun had
invited a military mission from France and a naval mission from Britain
to lay the foundations of the new Japanese armed forces. The work of
these missions was interrupted by the rebellion which established the
personal authority of the emperor; but in 1872 they returned, and found
their pupils adaptable and industrious. In 1875 the emperor destroyed
the samurai monopoly of arms with a proclamation which aligned Japan
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with the powers of Europe in its adoption of universal military service.
‘In future’, he declared, ‘I wish the army to be the entire nation.’ Ten
years later the French military mission was followed by one from the
German empire, and Japanese military training and organisation became
yet more closely modelled on the German pattern. Three-year compulsory
service with the colours and four with the reserve; a territorial force
modelled on the Landwehr; territorial military districts; one-year volun-
teers; all were established or confirmed by the legislation of 1889.
Neither the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 nor the punitive expedition of
1900 in which the Japanese collaborated with the western powers gave the
world more than a foretaste of the military efficiency which was to prove
so devastating in 1904-5 in the war with Russia. But 1894 gave the
Japanese navy a greater opportunity to show how much it had imbibed
from its British tutors. In development it had lagged far behind the army.
In 1894 it still possessed only three armoured vessels, twenty-year-old
ironclads of totally obsolete pattern, and its main strength lay in three
unarmoured cruisers mounting heavy battleship guns. But in seamanship,
training and gunnery the Japanese showed themselves infinitely superior
to their more powerfully equipped rivals, and at the battle of the Yalu they
won that command of the sea which alone made a victory on the main-
land possible. Thereafter the Japanese government worked hard to
strengthen a force whose usefulness had been so signally proved. In 1895
a building programme was set on foot which involved the construction of
four 15,000 ton battleships and four 7500 ton armoured cruisers— one of
the former and two of the latter to be built in Japan itself, in the dock-
yards whose expansion and re-equipment constituted a major part of the
new programme. In 1904 the Japanese navy was to meet the Russians
with six first-class battleships and eight armoured cruisers, and establish
a supremacy in Pacific waters which was to have profound effects on the
balance of power.
According to Bloch’s estimate in his book La Guerre Moderne (rv, 280)
the total expenditure on defence of the principal European powers
increased between 1 874 and 1 896 by slightly over 50 per cent. The expendi-
ture of the German empire during this period rose by 79 per cent, and that
of Russia by 75 per cent, while Britain, France and Austria-Hungary
followed with 47 per cent, 43 per cent and 21 per cent respectively. For
the states of western Europe the burden was not crippling: their eco-
nomies were expanding and great interests of labour as well as of capital
were vested in the thriving shipyards and in the great, sometimes inter-
locking, concerns of Armstrong, Schneider, Skoda and Krupp. But
Russia was less able to sustain the burden. Between 1883 and 1897
Russian military expenditure rose from 201,564,621 roubles to 284,379,994
— this excluding the considerable cost of strategic railways ; and the whole
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sum had to be found out of a state budget which totalled only 1414 million
roubles. There can be little doubt that the strain of keeping up in an
armaments race which it was ill able to afford was a powerful, if not the
decisive factor in impelling the imperial Russian government in August
1898 to propose that the powers should confer on ‘the most effective
means of ensuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and durable peace
and, above all, of putting an end to the progressive development of the
present armaments ’.
The imperial circular was received by the powers with much the same
sceptical politeness as had been shown towards the apocalyptic suggestions
which came from the same quarter after the Napoleonic wars; but all the
states invited — which included Luxembourg, Montenegro and Siam in
addition to the powers diplomatically represented at St Petersburg — sent
representatives to the conference which opened at the Hague on 18 May
1899. So far as disarmament was concerned the conference was a failure.
The Russian proposals included a five-year moratorium on military
budgets and the size of peacetime armies, and a restriction on the adoption
of explosives more powerful or armaments more effective than those at
present in use. These proposals were almost unanimously rejected. The
disarmament subcommittee reported ‘ that it would be very difficult to fix,
even for a period of five years, the number of effectives, without regulating
at the same time other elements of national defence; [and] it would be no
less difficult to regulate by international agreement the elements of this
defence, organised in every country upon a different principle’. As to the
restriction on further inventions, the representative of the United States
flatly declared that his government ‘ did not consider limitations in regard
to the use of military inventions to be conducive to the peace of the world ’.
Eventually the conference voted only three restrictions on armaments.
One was on the ‘ throwing of projectiles from balloons ’ — for five years only,
since by the end of that period some method of discriminate bombing
might have been devised; and the others were on the use of soft-nosed
bullets and asphyxiating gases — both voted over the protests of the United
States and Great Britain.
Yet in two respects the achievements of the Hague Conference were
considerable. First, it took two further steps in the direction of the
humanising of war which would do much to soften the terrible struggles of
the twentieth century. The Geneva Convention of 1864, with its provisions
for neutralising medical personnel and establishments and for ensuring
impartial attention to all wounded, was extended to naval warfare, and all
powers which had not yet signed the Convention now did so. At the same
time the Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War which
had been drawn up at the Brussels Conference in 1 874 was overhauled and
embodied in a new Convention defining the status of belligerents, the
correct treatment of spies and prisoners of war, the limitations to be
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observed by armies conducting operations or occupying hostile territory,
and the protocol to be observed for truces and armistices. Secondly, the
powers represented, recognising that arbitration was ‘the most efficacious
and at the same time the most equitable’ manner of settling international
differences of a juridical character, undertook to organise a permanent
Court of Arbitration, with the necessary secretariat, to sit at The Hague.
Like later and more ambitious attempts at the creation of international
organisations, the Hague Court could only provide machinery for powers
with sufficient goodwill and self-restraint to use it; and the restraints
enjoined by the Hague Convention could have no sanction save the
humanity and the enlightened self-interest of the belligerent powers.
These were slender threads to bind powerful sovereign states fighting for
their survival with increasingly destructive implements of war.
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CHAPTER IX
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
IN EUROPE
about the year 1870 Europe entered upon a new phase in its history
ZA with the final achievement of the nation-state in Germany and Italy.
1 A The emergence of two nation-states in central Europe marked the
sole great change within the European system of states during the century
between the Congress of Vienna and the first World War. It was a change
that transformed the system without disrupting it. Two predominant features
of the nineteenth century, liberal constitutionalism and the principle of
nationality, characterised this event ; the third dynamic of the age, socialism,
did not make its advent till the revolt of the Commune in 1871.
In the i870’s liberalism was at the zenith of its historical course. In
most of the countries of Europe it had brought into existence written con-
stitutions with parliaments, a widening franchise, and constitutional
guarantees of personal freedom. The last relics of legal inequality and
bondage were removed by the Revolution of 1848 and Russia’s abolition
of serfdom in 1861. Equality before the law and personal freedom had
practically everywhere become principles in law, despite strong opposition
from both the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Liberalism had thus
achieved its civil programme; but the liberals’ constitutional aims, an
executive controlled by parliament and a legislature with unlimited
powers, had been realised only partially and in differing degrees in the
various countries. From about the mid- 1 870’s the liberal parties, hitherto
drawn from notabilities in the middle classes, became more and more
involved in difficulties that raised problems of form and organisation.
Towards the close of the century the social problem of the working class
brought liberalism everywhere face to face with the task of translating
legal freedom into real freedom within the social pattern. This seemed
impossible without offending such radical liberal principles as the rejection
of state interference in the social or economic field; thus social liberalism
could never launch out whole-heartedly.
The principle of nationality achieved its greatest triumph of the century
in Germany and Italy, culminating in the foundation of states by Bis-
marck and Cavour; yet these were the very states which raised a bulwark
against any further upsurge of nationalism. It is true that in Italy this
bulwark was soon breached by the impetus of irredentism, but the founda-
tion of the German empire by Bismarck long served to halt the advance of
nationalism, in particular in the south-east, in Austria. For the time being
in the areas of mixed nationality in eastern Europe the movement towards
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the nation-state gained ground only in European Turkey, where by the
close of the century Bulgaria and Roumania had achieved autonomy.
The conservative forces and parties sought to hold their ground in the
trial of strength with the thrusting forces of the age, in particular with
democratic and national ideas; in England the Conservative party de-
veloped along the lines of ‘democratic Toryism’, and in Prussia and
Germany it took over the representation of agrarian interests. Almost
everywhere constitutional democracy with its parliamentary groupings
was still compatible with influential monarchical institutions, as it was in
Great Britain. In Spain after the Carlist wars the monarchy again (in
1875) overcame the republic; the German empire and Italy, the new
nation-states of central Europe, were united and held together by strong
monarchies ; and within the Turkish empire the new states of Bulgaria and
Roumania were headed by monarchs. In France the republican form of
government set up after the collapse of the Second Empire survived,
though even here there were repeated attempts to restore the monarchy.
In Austria-Hungary and in Russia, with their powerful monarchical
systems, the process of democratisation had for various reasons made
the least headway. In Germany, where the imperial authority set up in
1871 was subject to federal rather than parliamentary restraint, an evolu-
tion towards ‘personal rule’ by the emperor began after 1890, though this
was never ratified in the constitution. At the close of the century Europe
was still predominantly monarchical; and it was obvious in almost every
European state except France and republican Switzerland on the one hand
and Russia on the other that the middle classes, at any rate for the time
being, preferred monarchical to republican forms of government.
At the same time, although foreign treaties, as for instance the Triple
Alliance between the German empire, Austria-Hungary and Italy, were
still sometimes concluded with the aim of strengthening the principle of
monarchy, monarchism had lost all autonomous historical force and now
existed only in conjunction with more powerful contemporary influences
such as constitutionalism, giving these indeed in many cases effective sup-
port but at the same time being limited and repressed by them. The
industrial workers’ associations and their political organisations, more-
over, almost all supported the principle of a democratic republic; and it
was mainly they who brought about the fall of the great monarchies in
central and eastern Europe at the end of the first World War. The alliance
between the monarchy and the working class, the social kingship dreamed
of by many and proclaimed particularly in Germany by writers from
Lorenz Stein to Friedrich Naumann, never became a reality anywhere.
In the three decades from the Franco-Prussian War to the turn of the
century the acute tension between the monarchy and the middle classes
that had occupied the states of Europe during the first half of the century
was relaxed, except in the case of Russia. What was left of the revolution-
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ary tradition passed to the working-class movement; but this still lacked
the ideological and political momentum to launch a decisive attack.
This explains why the decades between the revolt of the Commune in Paris
and the first Russian revolution in 1905 form the longest period in the
century up to the first World War without any revolutionary upheaval.
These decades also saw an unprecedented extension and increase in the
power of the state both within and beyond its frontiers, a power growing
alive to the resources and potentialities of technical science and the
industrial system. The social community mobilised by the industrial
revolution became a dynamic force whose impetus overran every state
frontier; increase in population, its concentration, its movements, oc-
curred in all states and were only partially under the control of the states.
And further, the urge felt by this mobilised community seized the states
themselves ; they flooded out beyond Europe and rounded off centuries of
discovery and colonisation abroad with a breathless surge of political
expansion. The imperialism that characterised the new epoch was simply
the outlet for internal changes and transformations, the political aspect,
one might say, of the process by which the industrial revolution which had
started in Europe went on to embrace the whole world.
The continuous increase in the population of Europe forms the back-
ground to every nineteenth-century political and social development; and
this increase slightly exceeded the growth of population in the world as a
whole, where the proportion of Europeans rose from 22-4 per cent about
1800 to 25 9 per cent about 1900. TThe population of Europe increased
from roughly 187 millions in about 1800 to 266 millions by 1850 and
401 millions by 1900; in other words it more than doubled itself within a
century. This curve of growth no longer represented an increase in the
number of births, for in almost every European country this had passed
its peak by 1890 and in certain countries, for instance in France and in
Norway and Sweden, its gradual decrease had been going on much longer. 1
1 The curve of live births per thousand of population reached its zenith as follows:
1861-70
England and Wales
35-2
Belgium
316
The Netherlands
35-3
Russia
50- 0
1871-80
The German empire
39-1
Austria
41-8
Scotland
351
Ireland
30-2
Denmark
34-0
1881-90
Hungary
44-0
Italy
37-8
Bulgaria and Roumania alone reached their zenith at a later date. The figures for European
Russia are not entirely reliable, but despite a higher actual peak they reveal a slow decline
from the 1860’s. (From J. Conrad’s Grundriss zum Studium der politischen Okonomie,
I923-)
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The increase arose mainly as a result of the decline in the death-rate; so
the maximum excess of births over deaths usually occurred later than the
highest birth-rate figures. (The clearest examples here were Germany
with its excess of 14-4 per 1000 in the yearly average for 1 901-5, Italy with
12-0 for 1903-13, and Austria-Hungary with u-2 for 1901-5.)
The population of the European states increased at different rates in the
last three decades of the century. France showed the least change (in
1872, 36-1 millions; in 1901, 38-7 millions); Great Britain and Ireland rose
from 31-5 millions (1871) to 41-5 millions (1901), Germany from 40-8
millions to 56*7 millions (1870-1900), Italy from 26-8 millions (1871) to
32-5 millions (1901), Austria-Hungary from 35-9 millions (1869) to 45-4
millions (1900). But, as these figures show, no important shift was
established in the balance between any one European power and another;
and besides they were seeking compensation overseas. Only European
Russia’s increase (72-2 millions in 1867 to 115-9 millions in 1897) fore-
shadowed a significant shift, in favour of the Slav peoples.
But the whole great process of increase in population should be looked
at not so much from the state or national point of view as in the light of
the expansion of industry in Europe which was then taking place. The
surplus among the peoples of Europe now crowded together in the great
industrial regions, above all in the lower Rhine area and on both sides of
the English Channel. The Ruhr district outstripped others at this time in
its growth, but the older industrial areas, such as the English Midlands,
Saxony, the Bohemian frontier districts, shared in the upsurge, though
their sharpest percentage rise in population came before 1870. After that
date the process of urbanisation gathered speed everywhere and it
determined the future patterns of living and the framework of the Euro-
pean industrial community. The larger the towns the greater their in-
crease; in Germany there were eight cities of over 100,000 inhabitants in
1871; in 1900 there were thirty- three. For the rural population on the
other hand the percentage remained static or even decreased. This tend-
ency was most clearly seen in England after 1870. Eastern Germany, the
region where the greatest increase in rural population had followed
Freiherr von Stein’s emancipation of the peasants, showed a check from
the mid-i88o’s onwards. Only in European Russia, affected by the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and in south-eastern Europe, did the
rural population now begin to show its greatest increase.
The growing concentrations of industrial population were chiefly the
result of migratory movements with a constantly widening radius. The
industrial cities thus began by filling up the nearer and farther rural fringe;
the influx of settlers from eastern Germany into the Ruhr district repre-
sented a more distant migration forming a considerable element — in some
places virtually the essential one — in the growth of the industrial popula-
tion. Special conditions have always governed the confluence of these
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millions into the capitals of Europe; one can seldom define the areas
drawn upon, though this is possible for instance for Berlin.
This movement of the masses during the final decades of industrial
expansion left the national framework of the European community in the
main unaltered. Only at isolated points did the migrations set in motion
by the economic revolution cross the European state frontiers. The first
instance was France, where the increase in population came earliest to a
halt and a considerable influx, mainly from Italy, can be noted; and Polish
agricultural labourers, at first mainly on seasonal work, penetrated eastern
Germany. But emigration overseas from most countries of Europe during
the last thirty years of the nineteenth century was still considerably
strengthening and extending the white man’s area of settlement in the
world, in particular in North America. Between 1871 and 1900 the emi-
gration from Europe to the United States reached the figure of 10-5
millions, the proportions among the nations of Europe differing widely at
different times (see ch. xxrv for details). As many again went to other
overseas areas. The motives for this emigration were seldom political or
religious as they had been in the first half of the century, except perhaps in
the large states of eastern Europe and in Ireland; they were chiefly eco-
nomic and social. But emigration was also an indication of the greater
ease of transport and of the progressive growth of the world into one
economic whole; within Europe national differences have never been
abandoned, but in the new lands national barriers fell more easily. The
new community in the United States grew to be as much a melting-pot of
the nations as of the orders and classes.
The emigration from Europe was a sign that economic and technical
development there was not keeping pace with the growth in population.
And yet, especially in the last three decades of the century, industrialisation
made enormous strides, and the expansion of industrial methods of pro-
duction over all the countries of Europe and then over the areas of settle-
ment in North America, the increased production of commodities, the
improvement of transport and the growing exchange of merchandise
gradually brought into being a universal system, delicately harmonised
and reacting extremely sensitively to agitation at any point, a compre-
hensive economic system that was directed technically, financially and
politically by Europe and that was the economic counterpart to develop-
ments in world politics. Liberal economists during the middle years of
the century had seen the world economy that was now beginning to take
definite shape as an organic system that would put one uniform commu-
nity in the place of the traditional pluralism of nations and states. Inter-
national free trade as proclaimed in that model agreement of economic
liberalism, the Cobden Treaty of i860 between England and France, was
to bring about the threefold harmony of world trade, world unity and
world peace. But events moved in other directions; the world economic
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crisis of 1873, whose effects were still felt up to the mid- 1890’s, shook the
naive belief in continuous progress, and free trade, which had been
adopted by practically every state but the United States and Russia, was
ending. Between the late 1870’s and the 1890’s most of the countries of
Europe went over to protection except Great Britain, the Netherlands,
Denmark and Turkey, which for different reasons kept to free trade. This
predominance of protectionism in economic matters was a symptom of
the intensification of state control that marked this period and was to take
other forms, for instance, state intervention in the socio-political field and
colonial imperialism. International commerce changed into an economic
struggle between rival competing states, the momentum behind actions
governing trade and economics shifted indirectly to the political field, and
this was overshadowed by the profound hostility felt by the powers,
urged on by their own economic interests, for each other.
The great convulsions that changed central Europe by the formation of
the Kingdom of Italy and the German empire did not completely upset
the order set up in 1815; they simply modified its structure at certain
important points. The idea of the nation-state had prevailed in those
regions where the Congress of Vienna had wished to prevent its appear-
ance; but after 1870 it seemed essential that the progress of the nation-
state idea should be limited to what had been achieved by the wars that
had set up the German and Italian nation-states. From 1882 onwards
Italian irredentism was held in check by the alliance between Austria-
Hungary and Germany, and did not develop fully. Bismarck described
the German empire he had brought into being as ‘ satiated ’, and held aloof
from any sort of national irredentism, even from any intervention on the
part of the empire in favour of the German groups in Austria and Russia’s
Baltic provinces. And Bismarck’s successors held to this course; the mem-
bers of the pan-German ( alldeutsche ) organisations formed after 1890
belonged to an Opposition that was hostile to official German policy, and
their influence on it was negligible.
In the whole of eastern Europe the internal problem facing the great
empires remained that of nationality; and this affected their policy
towards one another. In Russia the influence of a nationalism nourished
on pan-Slav ideas increased, and it helped to weaken those who looked in
supranational and federal directions, and to transform the country into a
nation-state comprising Great Russia. In the Baltic provinces (Alex-
ander III on his accession in 1881 had been the first tsar not to ratify
their traditional privileges) the 1880’s were a period of intensified russiani-
sation, especially in the schools. The close of the century witnessed the
crippling of the Grand-Duchy of Finland’s autonomous constitution.
After the Polish revolt of 1863 Russia’s portion of Poland had lost the last
remnants of independence and now also felt the increasing weight of a
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policy of russianisation. In Germany the position of the Poles and Danes,
those non-German minorities in the east and north, was radically altered
after the founding of the German empire in 1871 ; for the state had then in
theory accepted the principle of the German nation and in practice had
adapted itself to it. The German empire and Austria agreed in 1878 to
waive Article V of the Prague Treaty of 1 866 which would have given the
inhabitants of northern Schleswig a free plebiscite on union with Den-
mark. The attempt of the Magyars, in control in Hungary, to create a
Magyar nation-state out of the eastern half of the Habsburg Dual
Monarchy had effects still felt in much later years. While these events
were taking place Gladstone was trying in vain to introduce his Home
Rule Bill into parliament, a bill to end the subjection of the Irish people
and to give them self-government.
During this period the governments of the great powers decided almost
without exception in favour of the national majorities from which they
drew their support and which they tried to render as homogeneous as
possible in language and national feeling. In the political system of the
classic nation-state there was scarcely room for the privileges of minorities.
It was only in Turkey, a feeble and decadent state, that the nations con-
tinued to move towards autonomy and new states, as for instance
Roumania (1878) and Bulgaria (1878, 1887), came into being. In the case
of Bulgaria it took only a few years for a national movement to annul (in
1887) the decision taken by the Berlin Congress to divide the country into
two states in the interests of the balance of power. The movement towards
national independence was evident in northern Europe also, where it
grew increasingly obvious that the union of Sweden with Norway could
not last. Norway eventually dissolved it in 1905. And in states of multi-
national structure, for instance in the Cis-leithan half of the Dual Monarchy
of Austria-Hungary, the national problem came to affect both organisa-
tion and constitution. After 1870 more than one attempt was made to
relax the centralisation introduced by Joseph II and based on the domi-
nance of the Austro-Germanic element, and to place the nations and
languages of Bohemia and Moravia, those centres of national contention,
on an equal footing. These attempts touched the traditional hegemony of
the Austro-Germans on a sensitive spot (see the efforts of the Hohenwarth
Ministry in 1871 to adjust German-Czech differences, and Badeni’s
Languages Decree of 1897). While within this region it was possible only
at one or two points to dull the keen edge of nationalist antagonism, as in
the Moravian settlement of 1905, Switzerland kept its position outside the
storm-zone of national strife. The constitutional reform of 1874 ratified
the federal system of government which showed itself the most effective
instrument for neutralising multi-lingual nationalism.
The nation-state, now predominant in Europe, took on very different
forms. France, where the great Revolution had destroyed the old historic
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provinces, still held even under the Third Republic to a type of centralisa-
tion. There were no links connecting the centralised administrative and
political organisation with the very vigorous political life of the local
regions, in particular of the constituencies. Italy’s national monarchy
followed this French pattern and emulated France and Belgium in
creating a centralised administration with new provinces which obliterated
the frontiers of the former Italian states. Such a system was the outcome
of a national revolutionary uprising against the existence of separate states
controlled by foreign dynasties; but it was quite out of touch both with
the rich historical and cultural inheritance of Italy’s different provinces
and with their varied economic and social structure; and it met, particu-
larly in the south, with violent opposition. Despite criticism levelled at
the ‘Piedmontism’ of the new administration of Italy, the frequent
demands for decentralisation, for self-government in the provinces, went
unsatisfied. The German nation-state of 1871, unlike that of Italy, was
founded as a federation of monarchies, a league of sovereigns and free
cities. The constitution firmly established Prussian hegemony, though
mingling it in its own way with federal and centralising traits. Towards the
end of Bismarck’s term of power, as the author of the Constitution came
more and more into conflict with the Reichstag, he considered dissolving
the alliance of 1870-1 and organising a coup d'etat to bring a new one into
being, with the national-democratic institution of the Reichstag weakened
or even eliminated. After Bismarck’s fall in 1890 came the ‘personal rule’
of the emperor; this had no foundation in the Constitution, but it un-
doubtedly expanded the imperial dignity into a far more impressive
symbol of national unity than anything provided for at the creation of the
empire.
Great Britain differed from the countries of the Continent in that the
keynote of its constitution was neither centralisation nor federal alliance
but union; its traditional component countries were retained by, were
fused in, the unity of the joint state and its institutions, in particular its
parliament. In Catholic Ireland alone this system was always felt to be
one of oppression, of force, and was resisted; for there the issues were
national and not merely constitutional. When the first efforts towards
Home Rule for Ireland were made in 1886 and 1893, they were defeated
by an intense and violent opposition from many sources. But the signifi-
cance of the Irish Question went far beyond the struggle for Home Rule
and lies in the conception of self-government which was then modifying
the whole British empire. For during the age of imperialism the greatest
administrative and constitutional problems no longer concerned the
development of the nation-states but the structure of the great imperial
complexes.
At this stage colonial expansion everywhere clearly took place under
the aegis of the state and led to some kind of official annexation, though
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sometimes this was no more than a protective superstructure on top of
the existing local or native authority. The nation-states of Europe thus
expanded into organs of world-wide dominion at a time when conceptions
of policy appropriate to a nation-state still governed their constitution and
administration. The classic example here is the British empire, which had
gained such a start in colonial expansion that none of the other powers
was able to draw level with it. British imperialism was now directing its
energies chiefly towards Africa; it was in Africa that it developed great
schemes of expansion and control and a political programme; it was also
in Africa that it became most involved (from the intervention in Egypt in
1882 to the Boer War) in both political and military problems. But if this
last great phase of expansion undoubtedly lent urgency to the problem of
organising a world-empire which, in Seeley’s well-known phrase, had
originated ‘in a fit of absentmindedness ’, two of the fundamental ideas
which arose sprang from the political tradition of the mother-country.
These were the idea of responsible self-government and the notion of
trusteeship. The position of the great settlement areas in the empire —
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — was radically trans-
formed by the extension of self-government. In the other types of colony —
the old Crown colonies, the Malay states, Cyprus and various regions in
Africa — the conception of trusteeship on behalf of the native peoples took
on a new significance. In theory, even if theory was not always fully in
harmony with the somewhat harsher realities, it now affirmed rather than
questioned the principle of colonial sovereignty. Stress was similarly laid
on India’s existence as a separate political unit within the empire when
Disraeli conferred on the Queen in 1876 the title of ‘Empress of India’.
With the British empire, as with the smaller Habsburg empire on the
Continent, the increasing organisation of its member-units at once raised
the question of the organisation of the empire as a whole. This is where
a third idea, that of federation, became an active force. This idea could not
be borrowed from the modern constitutional structure of the United
Kingdom with its centre in a mother-country; it clearly went back to the
United States pattern which had influenced the federally based constitu-
tions of the Dominions. The United States, too, disproved the old pre-
judice that self-government must necessarily lead to the dispersion of an
empire’s component parts. Disraeli had first declared this to be an error
in his famous Crystal Palace speech of 1872. From Seeley onwards the
view gained ground that federation is rather a form of expansion. The
Imperial Federation League, founded in 1884, advocated federation for
the empire. But the dream of reorganisation as a grouping of federated
states was soon at an end, for the two colonial conferences of 1887 and
1897 failed to reach agreement on this. The Dominions did not support
Joseph Chamberlain when as colonial secretary he termed the Federal
Council ‘our ultimate ideal’. The institution of imperial conferences and
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a rudimentary military and economic organisation were the sole results.
The federal idea, evolved in continental empires in America and Europe,
could not dogmatically be applied to anything of so totally different a
structure as the British empire. Its unity has always depended on a loose
attachment and not on a formal constitution.
Among the European continental powers colonial expansion did not
alter the structure of the entire state to anything like the degree that was
the case with Great Britain. With Italy and the German empire the
colonial acquisitions were in any case not extensive enough to be of great
importance. The bold colonial aspirations of Italy’s Crispi era reached
their climax in the Treaty of Ucciali (1889) and in the establishment of a
protectorate over the Negus’s empire, but collapsed with the defeat at
Adowa in Ethiopia (1896). The German empire’s colonial policy, launched
in 1884 under Bismarck, at first aimed neither at direct imperial colonies
nor at a colonial empire but exclusively at ‘protected’ regions to be
governed by trading companies. This system proved a failure everywhere,
and most clearly so in East Africa (1888) and in New Guinea (1898), and
by the Act of 1900 the ‘protected ’ regions came under the direct suzerainty
of the empire, that is, the emperor, as up till then the imperial territory of
Alsace-Lorraine alone had been. In Germany’s case colonial expansion
had helped to strengthen the central power in the mother-country, and this
was characteristic of most of the continental states of Europe. The most
interesting example here is that of France. The French colonial regime
which during the last quarter of the nineteenth century controlled a large
colonial empire (1875-89, French Equatorial Africa; 1885-96, Mada-
gascar; 1881, Tunis; 1883-4, Tongking and Annam) was based entirely on
the centralisation also prevalent in France itself, and constituted simply
an offshoot of the French state. The French colonial administration, up
till 1889 a branch of the Ministry of Naval Affairs and later transferred to
the Ministry of Commerce, did not acquire its own department in the
shape of a Ministry for the Colonies till 1894; its aim from the beginning
was to make the colonies, though in a geographical sense and in standards
of living far removed from one another, into ‘une masse homogene
soumise a un regime uniforme’. The acquisition of many new colonial
territories with no cultural or historical link with France placed limits to
this aim, and towards the turn of the century the Act of 13 April 1900 led
to some decentralisation in colonial administration. Despite influences
derived from the English colonial system, the principles of colonial self-
government were, however, never applied anywhere; likewise in the pro-
tectorates, the French administration was far more in evidence than that
of the British in theirs.
On the whole, the political structure of the continental states of Europe
was altered very little by colonial imperialism. The disintegration of
Europe, which the stressing of nationalism had brought and was still
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bringing about, was helped rather than hindered by their indulgence in
nationalist imperialist enterprises. But they did not always and every-
where meet as competitors and rivals in the colonial territories; to a
certain degree the era of colonialism increased the general awareness of
the need to base inter-state relations on standards of international law and
to fix them in established institutions. Vast new areas came not merely
under the suzerainty of European powers, but also under the international
law evolved in Europe. A strange result of a combination on the one side
of expediency on the part of European powers and on the other of both
humanitarian and economic motives was the founding of the independent
Congo State under Leopold II of Belgium and his Association Inter-
nationale africaine, recognised by the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884/5.
The Congo Act of 1885 declared the furthering of trade and civilisation in
central Africa to be the basic aim of the foundation of the Congo State
and of the signatories to it. It proclaimed complete freedom of commerce,
prohibited the slave trade, and established the neutrality of the Congo
Basin. Here Belgium’s own neutral position in Europe was mirrored in
the African continent, and here too it obstructed the rivalry between the
larger powers. The powers announced in the Act that the bringing of
civilisation to underdeveloped areas as a kind of secular missionary task
was the purpose of colonisation, though in the case of the Congo state this
programme was not fully carried through.
The tension between self-interest and co-operation in the policies of the
states was not limited to colonial affairs; it pervaded all inter-state
relations during the era of imperialism, which with its increasing ease and
speed of communication brought states nearer to each other at the same
time as their growing national consciousness estranged them. By the end
of the nineteenth century every vestige of the former limitation of state
sovereignty, every memory of solidarity among the states of Europe, had
been obliterated. The great congresses like that in Berlin in 1878 or the
Congo Conference of 1884/5 were now the only sign that the community
of states and not merely its isolated members was still in existence. And
yet this community now expanded beyond Europe, and began to spread
over the whole world. The Congo Conference, in which the United States
of America took part, most clearly showed this. Nor were congresses
convened ad hoc any longer adequate to consolidate political and eco-
nomic links and to bring the nations into a closer unity in all branches of
technical and commercial intercourse. To meet the need new forms of
co-operation emerged; administrative unions and agreements between
states, for specific purposes, increased in every decade from 1870 on-
wards — from twenty in 1870-80, to thirty-one in 1880-90, sixty-one in
1890-1900, 108 in 1900-4. A network of international organisations and
inter-state treaties grew up, aimed at matching the political and individual
nationalism of each state with a kind of technical and legal internation-
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alism. This sought to extend as far as possible the legal security created
within the individual states and the effective range of technical achieve-
ment to the whole community of states. So these specific conventions in
the first place decided questions of traffic and communication, uniform
standards, the exchange of goods and ideas. For instance the Berne
Treaty of 1874 and the World Postal Treaty of 1878 brought the World
Postal Union into being, and in 1875 the Weights and Measures Union
with the Bureau international des Poids et Mesures in St. Cloud were set up
to control the metric system. In 1 886 there followed the Berne Convention,
signed by ten states for the protection of works of literature and art, and
ten years later the Private International Law Agreement, concerned mainly
with defining the forms of legal aid in inter-state relations.
What had been applied to certain regions and for special purposes
began to be attempted for the political intercourse between states, for the
settlement of the great vital questions of war and peace. This was first
tried at the Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907. True, several
tactical considerations affected the convening of these conferences, which
was initiated by the tsar; but this fact did not obscure the impression that
the conferences, where three continents were represented, were making a
determined move to set up standards of justice above the individual states
in the effort to arrest the decay of inter-state solidarity. The hope that the
end of all war would result from a fully developed and firmly established
international law was not to be realised; but acknowledged legal bounds
were being set to inter-state relations in war and peace during a period
when state sovereignty was making greatly increased claims and great wars
could work unparalleled destruction. The Brussels Declaration of 1874
was followed by a convention on the laws and customs of war on land, and
this in the form it acquired at the Hague Conference of 1907, the Hague
Regulations governing War on Land, is still considered valid. It has a
definite code for the different branches of international military law
(belligerents, the rights of armies of occupation, the position of prisoners
of war, are all defined). The idea of an international court of arbitration,
further developed after the first World War, took shape with the
setting up of a Cour permanente d' arbitrage at the Hague. This was not at
this stage a permanent court of justice but an institute to facilitate the
formation of tribunals to arbitrate in special cases. It represented the first
tentative move to provide the community of nations with institutions
which would uphold its principles of justice.
Despite all the estrangement in foreign policy, moreover, the individual
state systems and the constitutions of the states were drawing closer to one
another. There were still profound differences of historical and national
origin between the political and social structures, and these differences
were later to break through once more in the first World War; but the
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age as a whole tended towards greater uniformity of constitutional
patterns and social systems. In particular, the democratic principle made
headway in various forms; powerful forces still opposed it, especially in
Russia, but everywhere these had been driven intellectually and politically
on to the defensive.
Two problems clearly illustrate the constitutional development of these
decades; these concern the types of parliamentary system and the pro-
gressive extension of the franchise. By now all the states except Russia
possessed parliaments varying in importance and scope. But among the
great powers England and France alone had a genuinely parliamentary
system of government; and especially in these two countries the last
decades of the nineteenth century were a period of significant change and
development. In England decisive steps were taken to realise by gradual
reform the ideal of a universal franchise. The Reform Acts of 1867 and
1868 had considerably widened the franchise in the towns and had ad-
mitted a large proportion of the workers to it; and by the Third Reform
Bill of 1884 the Gladstone ministry brought representation in the country
districts into line with that in the towns. The Redistribution Act of 1885
brought uniformity to the electoral districts and introduced the principle
by which each constituency returned one member only. Not only did
these reforms almost double the electorate ; they entailed very considerable
consequences for the entire structure of the constitution, where the
principle underlying the plebiscite now became clearly established. Glad-
stone’s famous Midlothian campaign (1879-80) showed an important
swing towards this appeal to the masses of the electorate, a democratisa-
tion in even the conduct of politics, now finally breaking with aristocratic
tradition. The political parties joined in this process of democratisation;
this was the period when they created nation-wide organisations and
transformed themselves into democratic mass-organisations. And this in
turn affected the functioning of the parliamentary system ; it was no longer
the practice for ministers when defeated in the election to resign without
first meeting parliament again. This is what Disraeli did in December 1868
and in April 1880, and Gladstone in 1874; but Salisbury in the summer of
1892 waited until after his defeat in parliament. On the other hand a
defeat in the Lower House and the ensuing change of government now
usually led to the proclamation of an election; this is how Salisbury acted
as the new head of the government after the fall of Gladstone’s second
cabinet in 1885 and so did Gladstone himself when, on his defeat in the
Lower House in the summer of 1886, he asked for an immediate election.
The appeal to the electorate, although an integral part of the English
constitutional system and fully in accord with the democratisation of the
franchise, was in conflict with the undisputed right of the Crown to call in
a government, in particular to nominate its head. But this right was
decaying, except in unusual circumstances, with the rise of parties and of a
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recognised leader of the opposition, as was discovered in 1880 when
Queen Victoria tried to prevent the appointment of Gladstone. The func-
tioning of the classic English parliamentary system which developed
during the last decades of the nineteenth century rests upon a balance
between different elements in the constitution: the Crown, the parliament,
the people as a democratic body of electors. But it also rests upon the
classic form of the two-party system, even though this may at times be
disturbed, as it was by the emergence of Parnell’s Irish party in the elec-
tions late in 1885 or by the split of the Liberal party in the summer
of 1886.
The constitutional system of France’s Third Republic was radically
unlike the English. Established in the three Lois Constitutionelles of 1875,
it took on its final form in the main during the political crisis of 1877. The
sovereignty of the people as an idea was realised in the supremacy of
parliament, the gouvernement d’ Assemble, and there was nothing to
counterbalance it, no provision for a plebiscite or for authoritative presi-
dential control. Article V of the Constitution Act of 25 February 1875
foresaw the possibility that the president might order the dissolution of
the Chamber but conditioned it by requiring the consent of the Senate.
When in 1877 Marshal MacMahon as President of the Republic came
into conflict with the Chamber and dissolved it, his action was in fact
constitutional but it amounted to a coup d'etat. After that occasion the
President’s right to dissolve the Chamber actually ceased to be used. As
the Boulanger crisis only a few years later was to show, it was considered to
have monarchical tendencies rather than to be a principle of plebiscitary
democracy.
The absolute supremacy of parliament in the Third Republic was
matched by a poorly developed and pluralistic system of political parties
lacking any definite organisation, any ‘party machine’. This led to
cliques within parliament. Fluctuating majorities in the Chamber meant
that coalitions of different groups became the only possible mode of
government. This practice appeared to conform closely to the idea of a
liberal representative constitution, to which however, given the marked
independence of parliament, it was in fact radically opposed. The system
nevertheless contained considerable general stability despite frequent
changes of government; and it satisfied both the need for security and the
ideals of freedom felt by the mass of Frenchmen, who recognised this
oligarchic parliamentary regime as the best expression for them of the
democratic principle. The strongly individualistic trait in French life
operated against a more rigid party organisation and in favour of the
authority of the depute nominated and elected on local grounds.
Belgium was the European country whose constitution came nearest to
the English type, while Italy’s constitutional policy was subject to strange
fluctuations. It was based on the 1 848 Statuto of the Kingdom of Piedmont-
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Sardinia which the process of unification had made applicable to the rest
of the new Italian nation-state. The strong position occupied by the
monarchy in the Piedmont constitution of 1848 in theory extended to the
whole Italian nation-state, but it was weakened from the start because the
House of Savoy lacked any roots outside its own dynastic territories. So
the monarchy could not provide any effective counterbalance to parlia-
ment. Nor could any democratic expression of popular opinion; for the
masses of the Italian people had not become politically conscious enough
and, besides, the system of franchise in force till 1882 incorporated a
relatively high tax qualification limiting the electorate to some 600,000.
A reform of the franchise in 1882 considerably lowered this and reduced
the existing educational qualification to the completion of obligatory ele-
mentary schooling. The electorate rose to over two million and came near
to universal franchise, though the comparatively high figure of illiterates
continued to restrict it. The monarchical and democratic elements being
comparatively weak, the accent in Italian constitutional policy fell on the
Chamber of Deputies. Its political structure had considerably changed
since the foundation of the Italian nation-state; up till 1876 the Destra
party, then in power, had had the Sinistra in opposition. The English two-
party system seemed a possible model, but after the fall of the right-wing
ministry in March 1876 it was soon apparent how feebly rooted this system
was. Though a Sinistra government (Depretis, Crispi) now succeeded the
Destra, it no longer represented a clear alternative opposition. The parties
dissolved; Italy became the ‘classic country of no parties’; parliamentary
groupings and cliques with personal or regional ties, like those in France
but more exclusive in tone, replaced clear-cut party conditions; the
governments consisted of the personal followers of individual statesmen
and no longer expressed any definite political trends. Anti-parliamentary
criticism and ideology throve in this political climate. Political instability
became a principle embodied in the expression trasformismo.
While Italy tended towards parliamentary supremacy after the French
pattern, in the German empire, the other new nation-state, parliament was
restricted to purely legislative duties, and the constitution did not guarantee
it any direct influence on the government. By the complicated constitution
built up between 1866 and 1871 by Otto von Bismarck the Reichstag,
democratic and national in character and based on universal suffrage, was
to offset the particularist attitude expected from the individual states and
their rulers. It was designed to partner the other organ of the constitution,
the Bundesrat or Federal Council, which was not an Upper House but a
kind of collective government of the ‘Allied Governments’ ( Verbiindete
Regierungen). The liberals failed at the inauguration of the constitution,
and again in the 1878-9 crisis, to create imperial ministries responsible to
the Reichstag; the Imperial Chancellor bore sole political responsibility
for imperial policy and it was not essential for him to enjoy the confidence
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of the Reichstag. Every chancellor of the German empire owed his
position to the confidence of the emperor and lost it when this was
forfeited. Yet the Reichstag was not wholly without political influence
over the dismissal of this responsible imperial statesman; this was true
even of the chancellor-crisis of 1890 in which Bismarck fell. And a
clearer case is that of Chancellor von Billow’s dismissal in 1909. Parlia-
ment might be said to be gradually assuming control in the imperial
constitution.
The constitutional system in Germany might be called a constitutional
monarchy of a federal type, and it had two weaknesses. The first of these
was the lack of constitutional homogeneity as between the empire and its
leading state, Prussia ; though universal suffrage had been introduced in
the empire, Prussia retained to the end her unequal three-class system.
The second weakness was the disproportion between the extensive
suffrage on which the Reichstag was based and the limited powers of that
assembly. Universal suffrage favoured the rise of parties of the masses
and from the late i870’s onwards these concentrated mostly on repre-
senting social interests; yet at the same time there was no means for those
in command of these parties to succeed to public appointment. Only a
few party leaders, the National-Liberal Joha nn Miquel, for instance, who
rose to be Prussia’s Finance Minister, managed to secure government
posts. There was a great gulf fixed between the organised German party
system and the state. The democratic element which the constitution con-
tained was confined to a few spheres only ; a strange ‘ separation of powers ’
developed, for side by side there stood parliament, government and the
emperor, the last not as the representative of the presidency in the federal
state but as the holder of a special military command.
The constitution of the Swiss Confederacy, revised in 1874, represented
an entirely different type of federal constitution. It was an alliance not of
individual monarchies but of cantons based on ancient people’s law and
in the end was better able to resist excess of federal authority than were
the monarchies of the German federal state. This authority was exercised
through a federal assembly made up of the National Council ( Nationalrat )
based on universal suffrage and the Council of the States ( Stdnderat )
representing the cantons. The ascendancy of these parliamentary organs
reduced the federal government, the Federal Assembly ( Bundesrat ) of
seven members, to the level of a managing committee uninfluenced by
parliamentary majorities. Moreover, Article 89 of the revision of 1874
introduced a plebiscitary element, namely the referendum over federal
laws, which has since had important effects. It must be remembered that
this constitution was designed for a multi-lingual country and that,
though this is not very obvious in the constitution itself, a compromise
between the language groups was among the aims of this confederated
system. Though elsewhere democratisation almost always led to an in-
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crease of nationalist tension, the Swiss democracy — not least because of
its federal structure — remains an exception.
The Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, its existence
menaced by both the national and democratic tendencies of the age, failed
to develop any constitutional policy that would have brought this threat
under control. The constitution was based on the Ausgleich of 1867 which
reconstructed the kingdom of Hungary and then set up arrangements and
organs common to Hungary and the empire’s western half. Three joint
ministries, of War, Foreign Affairs and Finance, and bodies representa-
tive of both halves of the empire, consisting of delegations from the two
separate parliaments, made up the framework of the Dual Monarchy,
whose only actual link, however, was in the person of the emperor-king.
The ‘dualism’ of the monarchy appeared to favour the majority-peoples
in both the halves of the empire, but in reality it was only the Magyars
who fully benefited, while the lead held by the Germans in the western half
of the empire crumbled away piecemeal. In both western and eastern por-
tions of the empire any yielding to democratisation in the franchise and
the powers of the parliaments meant also a gain for the nationalist ele-
ments among the rest of the nations and nationalities. In the last decades
of the century all sorts of attempts were made to find some way out of this
dilemma, among them the idea of a tri-partite system with a special place
for the domains of the Bohemian Crown; and attempts were made in
different territories, especially in Bohemia and Moravia, to relieve tension
among the nationalities. These efforts succeeded only in Moravia (the
Moravian Settlement of 1905) and in the Bukovina. In the western half of
the empire, in addition to the existing particular class franchise, a general
franchise was introduced in 1896 to include all citizens over twenty-four,
empowered to elect, however, only 72 of the 425 members. Universal
suffrage was not introduced in the Cis-leithan kingdom till 1 907 and did not
extend to Hungary till the first World War.
It is hardly possible to speak of any constitutional system for the Dual
Monarchy as a whole, because of the different development of the two
halves of the empire. In both halves the parliaments were tardy in carrying
out the principle of democratic representation. In the Cis-leithan kingdom
in particular political fluctuations were a matter less of parties and party
power than of the influence of the different nationalities, and it was
questions of nationality which in fact brought about changes of govern-
ment.
None of the great countries of the continent of Europe produced any-
thing like the English system of parliamentary control; in Germany this
was prevented by elements in the constitution favouring monarchical
absolutism and federalism, in Austria-Hungary by the state’s complicated
multi-national structure, in France and Italy by the weakness of the
political parties. But it is possible for the two-party system to be in opera-
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tion and yet mean something quite different from what it does in England;
we see this in the countries of the Iberian peninsula and in the Balkans.
Here, in Greece and Roumania, in Spain and Portugal, we have a dual-
party system with in each case a progressive-liberal and a conservative
group of parties, and yet these parties were cliques and personal coteries
with no deep roots in the country. The parliamentary regime often
changed abruptly, and the lack of political continuity made important
political decisions impossible. This was especially clear in Spain after the
Bourbon restoration of 1875-6, where the alternation between liberal and
liberal-conservative ministries in no way expressed any constant interplay
between great rival popular forces but was merely manipulated from
above; each government on reaching power manoeuvred the voting to
secure a parliamentary majority. In Portugal, as in Italy, the principal
parties, progressives and conservatives, wore themselves out by frequent
changes from government to opposition and in the end one could hardly
call the system there a two-party one at all.
In Europe as a whole the close of the n i n eteenth century was a period of
dwindling constitutional development; the idea of the constitution rarely
had any force of its own but was now associated with the founding of new
states, with the principle of nationality. Only in France and Great
Britain did the structure of the state exhibit evolution from within, and
only in Russia, which still lacked any constitutional form of government,
was constitutionalism a revolutionary element. Especially in the smaller
countries (Switzerland in 1874, Belgium in 1893, the Netherlands in 1887)
constitutional amendments of a technical nature took place, but these
were not felt to be radical alterations in the structure of the government.
During this period no attempt whatsoever was made anywhere to settle
the question of how the workers’ political movements would affect states
whose constitutions had been framed in the main by the middle classes.
The political and ideological leaders of the workers tried to expose the
liberal constitutional system as a disguise for middle-class dominance, and
this remained a tenet of revolutionary socialism. But in reality constitu-
tional democracy began to make headway against the workers’ social
revolutionary movement.
This process was furthered by the most important event of these
decades in constitutional development, namely the democratisation of the
franchise which in most countries brought nearer universal suffrage for
all male citizens and in some indeed had already achieved it. Universal
equal suffrage without important qualifications existed de jure (by Article
20 of the Imperial Constitution) in the German empire from 1867 to 1871
(but not in its individual states except Baden, 1904); in France from 1870
to 1875, Spain 1890, Switzerland 1874, Greece 1864, Bulgaria 1879,
Norway 1898. Almost purely nominal property qualifications still re-
mained, for instance, in Great Britain (till 1884), Italy (1882), the Nether-
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lands (1896); the franchise was universal but not equal in Roumania (the
three-class system, by the Constitution of 1866) and in Belgium (plural
voting, by the Constitution of 1893). The suffrage, one of the most im-
portant bonds linking government and community, now began to develop
energy of its own and to alter the forms and institutions of politics. This
was especially true of the political parties ; in most countries these now
developed from being clubs of the notabilities in society, with a loose
organisation usually apparent only at election-time, into parties of the
masses with a fixed nucleus and roots spreading out all over the country.
This is seen most clearly in the case of the English Liberals; from 1867
onwards, at first in the Birmingham constituency, they set up well-
disciplined organisations modelled on the American Caucus and brought
politics to the masses. In other countries, however, the liberal parties
were among the most resistant to any form of democratisation and
retained longest their character as groups drawn from leading individuals.
The continental socialists, on the other hand, beginning with the Social-
Democratic party in Germany, which went this way from the 1890’s, after
the era of the Socialist Acts, created parties of the masses under united
leadership and supported and financed by a wide following; and through
their systems of organisation these parties penetrated every department
of cultural, social and economic life. The socialists had a socially homo-
geneous following; but a different type of modem mass party was
recruited from denominational Church groups — especially the Roman
Catholics — for instance, in Belgium after 1869 (Federation des Cercles
d’ Associations Catholiques), in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, in Austria-
Hungary, in Germany from 1870 to 1871 onwards, and eventually in Italy
where, to begin with, the pope’s veto had prevented any entry into parlia-
ment. The form of organisation that these denominational parties took is
most clearly seen in the structure of the German Centre party, which had
no real party machinery but was based on Church unions such as the
People’s Union for Catholic Germany ( Volksverein fur das katholische
Deutschland) and on denominational guilds. Such a party was not a
firmly articulated mass organisation but a loose structure, a focus for the
interests of various groups. The Catholic parties in other countries were
organised along similar federative lines.
A similar or identical structure among the parties of various European
countries must not blind us to their very different function in the different
national communities. Politics had still barely begun to reach the masses,
for instance, in the Balkan countries and in Spain and Portugal; the middle
classes were weak, and so the parties were able to retain their character as
cliques even though under the terms of the constitution they might have
considerable opportunities for expanding their influence. Elsewhere, as
in France, the strongly individualistic and regional tone in public life
hampered their full development, and in Russia, with its total lack of any
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constitution, the forming of any party still counted as a revolutionary
conspiracy. The German example shows that energy in organising a party
is not necessarily the same thing as political influence within a country.
Traditional patterns and forms of national life sometimes had their
influence within the parties; in England, for instance, there were the
religious sectarian movements with their home-mission programmes
reaching out to the masses, and in Germany the doctrinaire and dogmatic
elements in a Church bounded by state limits and later in the Philosophic
School. In almost every country the parties had now become preserves
from which those giving the lead in politics were drawn, though feudal
traditions and modes of advancement still held their own. This process of
recruiting those giving the lead in politics from among the parties had
gone farthest in the Romance countries, France and Italy; in Great
Britain, too, of course, it had gone a long way, though here a strong
aristocratic influence was still effective, as for instance in the Foreign
Service. The misfortune of the German parties lay in the impossibility of
rising from party politics to any public office or appointment.
At the close of the nineteenth century liberalism still occupied a domi-
nant position among the great political movements; but its political
function, its social sphere of influence and in part its stock of ideas had
undergone considerable change since the mid-century. European liberal-
ism’s past great achievement had lain in creating and developing the
liberal state, with its constitutionalism and rule of law, and in insisting on
certain political guiding principles adopted later by all kinds of non-
liberal movements and parties, denominational, socialist, aristocratic, and
sometimes even conservative. It had lain further in the decisive influence
which liberals had exerted, particularly in Germany and Italy but also in
eastern Europe and the Balkan countries, on the development of the
nation and the nation-state. The constitutional state that liberalism
demanded had even come into being, if only with the help of nationalism,
in those countries where, as in Italy, the anti-liberal forces entrenched
themselves behind particularism. The unification of Italy is the classic
example of a nation-state being formed by the extension of a constitution,
in this case the Piedmontese Statuto, to a much wider area. The third great
field of liberal influence had been that of economic policy and the impetus
given to it for instance by the Manchester School.
After 1870 liberalism was confronted by a series of fresh problems. The
most vital was the social problem which for the liberals had two aspects.
The first was the question, what was the liberal parties’ sphere of action in
society to be in an age when beside the middle class there was growing up
a new, steadily increasing class, organising itself along strict lines — the
workers? The second question concerned the role of the state in the social
crises which had followed from the industrial revolution and which were
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obviously not to be solved if the non-intervention policy of the Man-
chester School was to prevail. Liberalism did not arrive at any uniform
answer to these questions, and it was radically divided in its attitude to
the contemporary political movement which was carrying forward the
policy of the nation-state — to imperialism. The attitude of liberalism to
this question is another of the great general themes governing its policy
during these decades. And there is yet another, where the traditions of
older liberalism were even stronger: the relation between state and Church
or rather between the states imbued with liberal ideas and institutions, in
particular the Roman Catholic Church since the Vatican Council, which
opposed the liberalist spirit of the age.
What was the attitude and what were the resources of European
liberalism as it entered this phase of its history? In almost every country
it was organised into parties sharing in, or alone directing, the govern-
ment. The English liberal party under W. E. Gladstone, the most im-
portant liberal statesman of his day, alternated in office with conservative
cabinets and four times took over the government (1868-74, 1880-5, 1886,
1892-4). It adapted its organisation to the realities of mass democracy
and in its policy fused Whig traditions with the radicalism that had grown
up outside parliament. Italy and France had unstable cabinets whose
composition merely reflected different nuances of liberalism. This was
true of Italy’s trasformismo period after 1876 and of French politics
between MacMahon’s resignation (1879) and the Dreyfus crisis. In
France at that time the republican party was in power, its different groups
supporting a republican, anti-plebiscitary, parliamentary liberalism. Later
(after 1899) the Radical Social party gained the lead. In Germany between
1867 and 1878 the National Liberals were the party in power in the
Reichstag, but Bismarck’s attempt to bring them directly into the govern-
ment (by the candidature of Rudolf von Bennigsen as Minister in 1878)
failed because of the Chancellor’s and the National Liberals’ conflicting
aims. The liberal left wing in Germany was unwaveringly in opposition
from 1874 onwards; its right wing never managed to abandon an in-
herently ambivalent position between opposition and support, though on
the whole after 1884 it sided increasingly with the government. In Russia
before 1905, while there was as yet no constitution, no liberal party could
come into being, though the organs of local self-government, the ‘Zemst-
vos’ (Beseda), were the first step in that direction. Liberalism here was
still occupied with the struggle for a constitution and constitutional
institutions, and was almost considered a revolutionary political activity.
And roughly the same was true of Turkey.
Apart from the exceptional case of England, the liberal parties were
loosely organised. They retained their character of clubs for the upper and
middle classes and never achieved any contact with the mass-democratic
trend of the times. Nowhere, not even in England for any length of time,
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did the liberal parties manage to penetrate the working classes ; in every
case these were organised by socialist parties. In some countries, the
Netherlands after 1888 for instance, and Belgium, one can see the begin-
nings of the process of contraction to which the liberal parties have
succumbed since this century opened. But at this period men and ideas of
liberal mould were still to be found at the centre of contemporary events;
in some countries (Hungary and Roumania) liberal parties were con-
sistently in power. And yet some flagging of energy was noticeable in the
increasing tendency of political liberalism to fragmentation ; this process
was especially obvious in Germany and Italy; and in England too the
liberal party split in 1886 over the Irish Home Rule question. By the close
of the century liberalism, grown more opportunist, had lost any solidarity
in face of the great questions of the day, the questions of protectionism,
state intervention in social problems, and imperialism, which was bound
up with these other two.
The transition to protectionism, to the policy of tariffs, did arouse
violent liberal opposition. In Germany it led indeed to a rupture between
the government and the National Liberals, who up till then had supported
it. But their rejection of tariffs was far from complete; a group favouring
protectionism at once split off from the National Liberal party. Only the
liberal left wing which represented financial interests remained throughout
faithful to a free trade policy.
Interventionism in the social field, to which most governments, liberal
and conservative, were committed at this period, was a much more compli-
cated question. In view of the radical transformation in social conditions
liberal theory could not always remain true to the doctrine of the Man-
chester School ; it proclaimed the right of the state to intervene where the
freedom of the individual was being threatened by the unhindered course
of economic evolution. In England T. H. Green and Francis C. Montague
expressed this view; in his essay on The Limits of Individual Liberty
published in 1 885 Montague even wrote : ‘ In countries in which individuals
have neither the capital nor the qualities requisite for a plentiful produc-
tion of wealth, the State has to undertake many industrial enterprises
which are absolutely indispensable to this production.’ Liberalism was
very hesitant and uneasy over putting the policy of intervention into
practice — not least in England. Yet England provided an example of
liberal initiative. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 was a bold step towards
giving the Irish tenant-farmer some means of reducing his rents by fixing
them officially. It was a conservative government, that of Bismarck, that
first tackled the great socio-political task of bringing some security into
the workers’ precarious existence. The German Imperial Chancellor
brought in Insurance Acts against sickness (1883), accident (1884) and
old age (1889). The German liberals regarded this legislation with mixed
feelings. The liberal left wing remained radically opposed to Bismarck’s
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state socialism even though it embodied the conclusions of the liberal
parties’ own social tendencies. Only after Bismarck’s dismissal did this
group fall into step and try to improve the system of compulsory insur-
ance by introducing greater flexibility. The National Liberals, on the
right, tried to rid the government proposals of their background of both
state socialism and corporative ideas, but in the end they voted almost
unanimously for the Acts. Similar conflicts arose when the influence of
German social legislation caused a first wave of debate on accident
insurance Acts in many other European countries (Austria 1887; Norway
1894; England, ‘Workmen’s Compensation Act’, 1897; France, Italy,
Denmark 1898; Spain and the Netherlands 1900; Sweden 1901; Belgium
and Russia 1903). The impetus imparted by social liberalism was con-
siderable; but it is impossible to say that the driving force in social policy
at the close of the nineteenth century was to be found exclusively or even
predominantly with liberals or liberal ideas. The new social liberalism
despite its merits failed to achieve as much as liberalism in its early days
and its prime had done in constitutional matters.
Protectionism, state intervention and imperialism essentially made up
one whole; and towards imperialistic policy, too, liberalism presented a
divided front. This was especially true of British liberals; their views were
still affected by Cobden and the Manchester theorists who held that a
radical exercise of free trade would lead to relaxation and dissolution
within the empire and would bring more economic profit to the mother-
country than the defence of the older colonies and the acquisition of new
ones. The radicals and moderate liberals asked doubtfully whether a
democracy and an empire were compatible and some, like Lord Derby,
the fifteenth earl, concluded that ‘kings and aristocracies can govern
empire, but one people cannot govern another people’. But there were
also liberals among the early supporters of imperial expansion, for instance
in the 1880’s outstanding men such as Dilke, author of Greater Britain
(1868), and Joseph Chamberlain. From 1895 onwards the classic phase of
British imperial policy is linked with Chamberlain’s name, and this policy
sought to make the empire into a federated alliance and at the same time a
customs union with protective duties.
The problem of imperialism profoundly troubled German liberals also,
though the majority approved Germany’s entry into world politics and
only the social democrats had any anti-imperialist leanings. Liberals
such as Friedrich Naumann and Max Weber saw in Germany’s partici-
pation in the course of world politics the great destiny that alone could
train the German people to become a politically conscious nation and fuse
the working class with that nation. To them it presented not so much an
alternative to social reform as a prerequisite for it. In Italy, President
Francesco Crispi (1887-91, 1893-6) provided a typical example of a great
imperialist and of colonial policy undertaken in the spirit of a democratic
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liberalism strongly infused with nationalism. On its catastrophic collapse
in 1896 pacifist elements for a time invaded Italian liberalism, but on the
whole national irredentism took over what was left from the wreck of
imperialism.
Interventionism in the social field and imperialism were trends of the
day which had little or nothing to do with traditional liberal ideas even if
in course of time they became imbued with the liberal spirit. Liberalism
played a much more prominent part in the genesis of the crisis that
developed during these decades between state and Church. Three things
led up to this crisis. There was the advance of secularised laicised educa-
tion seeing its ultimate philosophical basis in a kind of scientific monism.
With this there went a marked antipathy to clergy and church, typical of
radical liberals and, on their left, of socialists. Even English radicalism
was not free of it, though English liberalism was characterised by its con-
nection with the nonconformist sects. In the second place there was the
vast increase in the power and authority of the state, which took place
once the conception of the nation-state had triumphed in Europe and
when the state began to spread its active influence over almost every
department of social and intellectual life. Liberalism had first appeared
as a force opposing this growth in the power of the state; then, taking a
Hegelian view and seeing the state as the most effective means of achieving
freedom, liberalism contributed materially towards the state’s increase of
power. If freedom and enlightenment came through the state, however,
then the Churches might become the real hindrance that many liberals
saw them to be, in particular the Roman Catholic Church which because
of its structure stood in an entirely different relationship to the state
authorities from any state-church system. Thirdly, the Roman Catholic
Church, threatened by the temper and events of the times, in particular in
Italy, countered the inroads on her temporal power with an intensification
of her papal system, and by the ‘spiritualisation of Canon Law’ (Vatican
Council of 1870).
From these three directions the ground was made ready for a conflict;
and this broke out on the highest level in Italy, where the occupation of
the Roman papal states and their incorporation in the Italian nation-state
was the beginning of an antagonism between the Curia and the Italian
state that lasted for nearly sixty years. The Vatican refused to accept the
Italian Law of Guarantees of 13 May 1871 ( Legge delle Guarentigie),
assuring to the pope his independent and sovereign status in Rome, and
rejected it as a unilateral pronouncement. This law also proclaimed once
more the separation of Church and state ( libera chiesa in libero stato)
which was an inheritance from Piedmontese-Sardinian liberalism. It
meant that Italy’s domestic policy was now anti-ecclesiastical; civil mar-
riage and state schools with religious instruction as an optional subject
were introduced. Public life in Italy was coloured by an anti-clerical
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liberalism controlled by laymen; and Catholicism could not develop any
opposing force in politics, since a Papal Decree of 1874 (Non expedit)
forbade the faithful to take any part in the elections, a prohibition not
relaxed till 1905.
In the German empire, where soon after its foundation the Kulturkampf
broke out, the state and in particular the Prussian state upheld a stringent
policy vis-a-vis the Roman Catholic Church; by the May Laws of 1873 it
sought to limit the rights of the Church to a considerable extent and to
bring it under state control. Further enactments threatened heavy
penalties for infringement of these Acts; bishops and priests were dis-
missed, imprisoned and sentenced. Bismarck had provided the first
incentive for this action, for quite un-liberal reasons of state, but it was
mainly the work of a liberal bureaucrat, namely Falk, Prussian Minister
of Education. The liberals in parliament, and especially the left wing, did
not remain passive in this struggle ; it was they who spread the slogans and
supplied the conflict with basic arguments going far beyond Bismarck’s
aims. Rudolf Virchow, who first used the expression Kulturkampf, traced
the liberal line of argument when he spoke of the struggle against the
hierarchy which had assumed ‘the peculiar character of Ultramontanism’
and also of intervention ‘for the emancipation, the secularisation of the
state*. In the Kulturkampf the liberals were defending the liberal nation-
state; but they could not prevent it when Bismarck, pursuing his own ends,
made his peace with the Curia over their heads. The final outcome of the
Kulturkampf was not a victory for the liberal state over a narrow-minded
Church, but at most a fresh demarcation of what Bismarck called
‘priests’ rule’ as distinct from ‘king’s rule’.
This result did not go so far as what was determined in France during
the Third Republic in the field of ecclesiastical policy. Here, too, 1 877 was
an important year; the defeat of the monarchists and the victory of the
republicans meant at the same time a victory for anti-clerical secularism
over the combined supporters of the Church and of the Restoration. The
republican state now proceeded to extend the jurisdiction of the state at
the expense of the Church and its organisations, indeed to prepare for
complete separation of Church and state. A school law of 1882 established
the principle of laicised state schools from which any kind of religious
instruction was excluded; and in 1886 the clergy were debarred from
teaching in state schools. There was a phase, known as the Ralliement,
during which the Roman Catholic Church and the Republic drew some-
what closer, but the conflict flared up again after the turn of the century.
In June 1904 a law was brought into force making education in the
secular state schools obligatory and excluding the religious orders from
any kind of instruction; finally, in 1905 the law ‘de separation de l’eglise
et de 1’etat’ achieved a break-through in favour of a radical state
controlled by laymen. In other countries, too, and at the moment when
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compulsory school attendance had just become established, the schools
developed into the battlegrounds between the ecclesiastical-denomina-
tional and the secularist-liberal outlook. In almost every case liberalism
tried to use the obligatory state schools as an instrument to further its
ideal of a free, autonomous education not bound by any dogma. This
same struggle went on in Belgium between laicised state schools (Act of
1879) and parish schools under denominational guidance (Act of 1884).
In the Netherlands (1889) the denominational schools held their ground
beside the state oifes and in Austria, where the Concordat had been
suspended in 1870 and a liberal ecclesiastical policy inaugurated with the
Church Acts of 1874, denominational schools were restored in 1883.
Liberals all over Europe were carrying out a similar policy, but the atti-
tude of English liberalism revealed a more complex dilemma. While
liberalism, especially in the radical wing, included a strong free-thinking,
agnostic element, its relationship to Nonconformity, to the Dissenters,
and thereby to the opposition between these bodies and the Established
Church, was no less important. Large sections of English liberalism —
here Gladstone is the most striking example — were much more concerned
than was continental liberalism with religious, denominational questions.
This is clearly illustrated, for instance, in the attitude of English liberalism
to the state Church. Free-thinking radicals and nonconformists could
agree in opposing it, but not in their reasons for doing so. The idea of
disestablishing the state Church therefore never really permeated English
liberalism; Gladstone, who for special reasons had moved the disestablish-
ment of the Church of Ireland, held fast to the state Church in England
despite numerous currents running against it. The Education Act of 1870,
dating from Gladstone’s first period as Prime Minister, did not simply set
up a secularist state school system after the continental pattern but
retained the Church schools under the Establishment side by side with the
new state schools. In spite of violent criticism from the liberals no changes
were made in this arrangement even under the Education Act of 1902.
Croce has called the period between 1871 and 1914 the ‘liberal era’.
This term is applicable in the sense that public life and political and social
institutions were imbued during this period with liberal ideas; and yet
liberalism was no longer alone in setting its seal on the age. For socialism
in its various degrees and nuances now at last became a political force. It
appeared in political parties, in revolutionary movements, in workers’
associations, in international unions, and it stimulated politics by rousing
states and governments to counteraction, to economic and socio-political
measures and reform. The theoretical framework of ‘scientific socialism’
provided by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was already in existence by
about 1870, but many ideas were added to it in the 1880’s and 1890’s,
when Engels published the second and third volumes of Marx’s Das
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Kapital (1885 and 1894) as well as the most important of his own writings.
About the turn of the century Marxist doctrine developed along two lines;
one was the so-called ‘Revisionism’ introduced by Eduard Bernstein in
his work Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgabe des
Sozialdemokratie (1889) which was later published in English with the
title Evolutionary Socialism. Its evolutionist tone was taken in part from
the ideas of the English Fabian Society, active in theory and practice from
1883 onwards. The other line, the concentration and intensification of
revolutionary elements in Marx’s doctrine, was followed in particular by
Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin in Russia. This divergence between a democratic-
social reform movement and an impetus towards social revolution, al-
ready implicit in Marx’s dual conception of revolution, was debated with
the utmost fervour during the last decades of the century. Consciousness
of the theoretical issues involved was very much stronger on the part of
the workers than it had been at the time of the earlier bourgeois revolu-
tions; indeed action sometimes threatened to be lost in the maze of
speculative deliberation. To prevent this there were only the concrete
economic interests of the workers, as represented by their trade unions,
and the ambition of practical revolutionaries ; among them Lenin emerged,
adopting any theoretical view simply as a technical means towards revolu-
tion. The period up to 1870 had been occupied with the struggle for the
theoretical bases of socialism; from now on the development of theory
and its practical application went hand in hand.
Even the forms in which the socialist workers’ movement took shape
were in the main considered to spring from tactical considerations, to
serve a period of transition; yet they involved fundamental decisions
affecting the future. Marx had played a decisive part at the founding of an
International Workers’ Union in London in 1864, in which the workers’
organisations from the individual countries were to count as subdivisions
and in no sense as independent party-like groups. These organisations
were all directed by the General Council as the highest executive body,
and in this Marx himself had a determining influence. This First Inter-
national was crippled not only by the conflict between the extremes it
contained, a conflict which subsided only after the expulsion of the
Anarchists under Bakunin at the Hague Congress of 1872; from the very
beginning it also suffered from its lack of close touch with the workers’
movements in the individual countries. When the General Council on
expelling Bakunin moved at Marx’s instigation to New York, it was
simply floating in a vacuum until its dissolution in 1876. Partly because
of legal difficulties it was impossible fully to bring out the international
character of the socialist workers’ movement in any organised form; but
Marx saw that it was retained as a vital ideological postulate assumed by
most of the national workers’ parties. The very varying political and social
conditions in the individual countries, the workers’ differing share in the
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suffrage and so in parliament, the unequal political activity of the working
class — all these led to the foundation of socialist parties of very diverse
nature, but they still had much more contact with each other than did the
liberal-national parties. In their revolutionary strategy and tactics they
exemplified every trend from the most ardent revolutionary zeal to a
leaning towards reform through evolution, as seen in the Fabians in
England or the ‘Possibilistes’ in France. In spite of numerous syndicalist
influences pressing for exclusively economic action such as strikes, and
also despite occasional contacts with anarchism, the socialist workers’
movement almost always made use of the liberal constitutional state with
its leanings towards an extension of the suffrage, and its parliaments and
parties, as the gateway to political responsibility. Only Russia was a
special case, its absolutist police-state making for very different condi-
tions; here affairs took an entirely different turn even after the granting of
some liberal institutions in 1905.
The three decades between 1870 and 1900 saw the founding and first
growth of socialist parties — in Germany 1869-75, Denmark 1878, France
1881, Italy 1882-92, Belgium 1885, Norway 1887, Austria 1888, Sweden
1889, Great Britain 1893-1903, the Netherlands 1894. In Germany,
France and other countries they on occasions felt the full impact of the
state against them. In the beginning various trends and groups — syndi-
calist, anarchist, Marxist — worked in association, later either fusing into
a whole or separating again. The political and sociological conditions of
the workers, who usually still lacked full political rights, certainly
strengthened the need to unite and checked the tendency to split except
over major decisions in revolutionary policy, though these were generally
fought out with the greatest bitterness. But the violent expression of
radical differences, for instance the question of revolution or evolution as
the basis for social policy, often obscures the process of constant adapta-
tion to new circumstances that was going on within the workers’ parties.
The German social democrats, for instance, officially condemned revi-
sionism more than once, in the party rallies of 1899, 1901 and 1903, and
yet their practice approximated to it more and more. The actual work of
forming a party, taking up a role in parliament, sharing in the political
problems of the day — all this demanded from the socialist parties a con-
siderable degree of tactical ability and willingness to compromise, and this
is not always apparent behind the facade of revolutionary speeches. This
must be kept in mind when studying the formative phase of the socialist
parties; it reaches far back beyond 1870, especially in France, Germany
and England.
The German socialists were the first to assume the lead. They had been
divided into on the one hand the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle and his
Universal German Workers’ Union of 1863, and on the other the ‘Social
Democrats’, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht for instance, who
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came from the lower middle-class liberal left and took up Karl Marx’s
ideas. Both branches met over the Gotha Programme of 1875, a compro-
mise uniting elements of Lassalle’s State Socialism with Marx’s Inter-
nationalism. In 1878 the first rise of the young Social Democratic party
was checked by the measures introduced against it under the ‘Exceptional
Law’ which sought ‘to control the universally dangerous aims of Social
Democracy’ ( Gesetz gegen die gemeingefdhriichen Bestrebungen der
Sozialdemokratie). The party was only able to evolve and expand after
the repeal of these laws in 1890. At the Erfurt Party Congress it brought
out a new programme, this time strongly Marxist in character, developed
and centralised its organisation and increased its membership and still
more its electorate. It became the strongest socialist party of all, its
indirect influence on the socialist organisations of other countries was
considerable, it played a leading part in the committees of the international
workers’ congresses that the Second International revived after 1889 as a
confederation of national workers’ parties. German social democracy
was a typical democratic party of the masses, with power to integrate its
organisation and its ideology as well. Gradually — and from 1891 on
completely — it took over the Marxist doctrine as the ideological basis of
its policy, to the exclusion of what had come from either Lassalle or the
Anarchists. And yet, without relinquishing the Marxist theory of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, it shifted its ground to democratic electoral
contests and a policy of parliamentary opposition and obstruction which
made no use of any revolutionary or terrorist technique. The reformist
trait in its policy was strengthened after the close of the century, despite
ideological opposition, by the movement within the trade unions.
German social democracy possessed penetrating power, thanks to its
discipline and its relatively compact ideology. In this it was superior to
most other socialist parties. In France, where socialist and specifically
revolutionary traditions are oldest, divisions dating from before 1870 split
the workers’ movement and could not, or at least could not yet, be bridged.
This showed at once when in the later 1870’s the fierce and bloody
persecution of those who had fought with the Commune abated and there
was a chance that socialist organisations might be built up again by the
communards who were returning. Within ten years there were a Marxist
group ( Parti Ouvrier Frangais), a group following the revolutionary-
activist tradition of 1789-1871 and based on L. A. Blanqui’s ideas ( Parti
Socialiste Ri volutionnaire) , a third group ( Parti Ouvrier Socialiste) in
which syndicalist ideas (‘Revolution of the Folded Arms’) lived on, and
finally the Federation des Travailleurs Socialistes de France which put
forward a programme of social reform described as ‘politique des
possibilites’. Etienne Alexandre Millerand, an independent socialist,
tried to rally French socialism under the banner of a social reform pro-
gramme with moderate demands for socialisation and a national-patriotic
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accent (The Programme of St Mande, 1896), and this appealed to trades-
men and small farmers alike. Millerand took office in the Waldeck-
Rousseau cabinet of June 1899 — an important date in European socialism.
But this step led to fresh divisions, so that the twentieth century opened
with a more intransigent group of Marxists and Blanquists and a more
moderate reformist one under Jean Jaures and Millerand. What really
prevented a complete victory for the Marxist branch was France’s socio-
logical structure, the local loyalties in French politics, the nationalist
element in French democratic republicanism.
Great Britain presents a complete contrast to the Continent; it was
impossible here for any workers’ party looking to socialist revolution and
based on class warfare and the dictatorship of the proletariat to develop
at all. English Radicalism, which had played so great a part in the regene-
ration of the liberal party, provided a kind of intellectual reservoir for
ideas and ideals of social reform that could also be drawn upon to
strengthen the political will of the workers. There was something of this in
the Fabian Society which from 1883 was promoting the idea of gradual
peaceful social reform. And there were the trade unions, of immense
importance for the practical improvement of working conditions in
industry, and thus exercising considerable influence on the development of
the political parties — very much more than did any continental unions,
even the German ones. Different elements worked together, then, to form
a workers’ party in England: the reformist socialism of small groups of
the intelligentsia, isolated political units like the Independent Labour
party of 1893, the practical social policy of the trade unions and finally the
need for direct representation of the workers’ interests in parliament. This
last in particular led to the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representa-
tion Committee which adopted the name Labour party in 1903 though
for a while it remained more a rallying point than an independent party.
If the formation of the British Labour party marked a complete victory
for the ideas of social reform, Russia offered an example of radical social-
revolutionary theory and practice taking shape. Socialism sprang here
from the revolt of the intelligentsia against the autocratic despotism of the
tsarist regime. A planned system of terror became an integral element in
this revolutionary movement, which lacked any legitimate means of
expression. Marxist ideas passed into the movement and the social
revolutionaries began to wonder whether Russia’s evolution into a
capitalist state was a prerequisite for any victory for the social revolution,
or whether the socialist movement could not link up with original com-
munist elements in Russia’s traditional agricultural system — a question to
which Marx had had no definite answer. Lenin, who headed the Bol-
sheviks, the majority in the socialist party, left this question completely on
one side and evolved a programme adapted to conditions in Russia: a
revolutionary outbreak before capitalism in Russia had created any class-
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conscious proletariat; mobilisation of revolutionary energies among the
peasantry; the organisation of a revolutionary action-party with a general
staff of professional revolutionaries to work towards a revolution by
force.
Among the socialist parties of the other European countries there were
many variations on the great alignments and conflicts that we have seen
in the four largest states. In Italy a revisionist type of Marxism had to
overcome strong currents of revolutionary anarchism and democratic
Mazzinianism. In Austria it proved impossible to maintain social
democracy above national distinctions in a party of socialists drawn from
all the nationalities; a Czech party split off, and in 1897 the whole party
dissolved into six national organisations which grew more and more
independent. In the Scandinavian countries the socialist parties were soon
following the English pattern of social reformism. By the turn of the
century the phase of organisation and ideological consolidation was every-
where at an end, and socialist votes began to increase with the extension of
the suffrage. Isolated socialist parties, especially the German one, were
soon among the most forceful groups in their parliaments. The question
arose of some share in the government, in the operations of parliament, in
political responsibility altogether.
Liberalism was able to influence contemporary thought directly and in
different ways through the guiding principles laid down in parliamentary
constitutions and through its share in political responsibility. Not so
socialism; it could only arouse opposition and sting its antagonists into
taking the initiative in social policies. The great insurance Acts of the
1880’s of Bismarck’s empire, the model for similar undertakings in many
countries of Europe, are an illustration of this kind of cause and effect.
Yet there were also many instances of state socialism at this time which
did not arise out of reaction to socialist demands. Many states for
instance, even before the close of the century, had begun to nationalise
their railways; Prussia (after the failure to establish the imperial railway
system Bismarck had wanted) did so ; and so did Belgium, Switzerland,
Norway, Serbia, Roumania and in 1905 Italy. These were the first signs
that in economics the shape of things to come would not keep the tradi-
tional outlines of classic liberalism but would also owe some of its features
to socialism.
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CHAPTER X
THE GERMAN EMPIRE
T he Franco-German War of 1870-1 completed the political move-
ment which had aimed at bringing the unity of a national state to
both Italians and Germans. In both cases the state had had to gain
control over a national revolutionary movement which had come to grief
when it opposed the states in 1 848. In Italy this movement had done more
than in Germany towards consolidating the nation into a whole; but in
Germany too, led politically by middle-class liberals, it had supplied the
chief stimulus in the great cause, even though representatives of the liberal
movement had been denied any appreciable share in the actual foundation
of the empire. At decisive moments in his trial of strength with Austria
even Bismarck had not hesitated to employ national revolution as a
political means; in 1866, if arms had not brought quick results, he would
have mobilised it with a call to the Germans — as also to the Czechs,
Magyars and other nationalities — within the Habsburg monarchy. But
the rapid and complete victory of Koniggratz meant that diplomatic and
military activity largely obscured the share that national revolution had
had in the founding of the empire. This had been precisely Bismarck’s
design : he meant to make use of liberal and democratic leanings only in so
far as they helped him to overcome the conservative and particularist
forces opposing him in Germany. The less Bismarck needed popular
support, the more he could and indeed had to consider the principalities
which in Germany, unlike in Italy, remained a constituent element of the
national state. The final decision brought about by the battle of Sedan
(1870) had confirmed and strengthened this characteristic feature of
German unification. By their annual celebration of Sedan, 2 September,
as their National Day, the Germans of the Second Empire showed plainly
that the empire owed its foundation to the military victory over France,
that the German princes had united under the Hohenzollerns for this
purpose and that the nation’s principal contribution had been a military
one. The original national movement towards unification, defeated in
1848 and revived again in the 1860’s, gradually receded behind all that was
expressed in the commemoration of the Day of Sedan.
From 1871 onwards the problems of Germany’s domestic and foreign
policy, as of Italy’s, were bound together in a new way by the existence of
the national state. If the European system of states, temporarily dis-
turbed by the events in Germany and Italy, quickly adapted itself to the
new situation, it was because it was reaffirmed by the conscious avoidance
of any further disturbance of Europe on the part of the two new national
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states. In 1871 Bismarck declared the new empire to be ‘satiated’. He
was talking here of resistance to any kind of revolution that might alter
frontiers in response to national feeling or allow internal social pressure
within the states of Europe to unsettle the existing political order. He set
out to curb the national uneasiness among Germans with which, though
only up to a certain point, he had formerly allied himself. And his decision
meant that the principle of the national state was not to be applied to
Austria-Hungary. He desired the assured continuance of this monarchy
and therefore held that the different nationalities there must remain linked
as before in a manner independent of nationality. On more than one
occasion he indicated to the Germans in Austria that any attempt to-
wards a ‘Germania Irredenta’ would be inappropriate. The Chancellor
needed stability within Europe in order not to endanger his young empire;
he therefore consistently set his face against any movements towards a
‘Greater Germany’ though these had followed naturally from the wish
to build up a national state comprising all territories predominantly
German in population. Bismarck was prepared to confine the German
nation politically within a ‘ Lesser Germany ’ in order to check the advance
of national revolution in Europe; and he was ready to make use of the
eight million Germans within Austria-Hungary to neutralise her non-
German peoples who were four times their number.
An internal policy of halting every democratic trend was the counter-
part to this restriction of German centrifugal forces. At home as well as
within Europe Bismarck sought to control the spirits he himself had called
up when he was carrying on his hazardous policy of bringing a united
empire into being. He had to find a middle course between on the one
hand the forces of tradition, still powerful and demanding restraint, and
on the other hand those of nationalism and democracy, pressing in the
direction of change. This characterised Bismarck’s whole policy between
1871 and 1890. His cauchemar des coalitions united with his fear of
revolution. With brave pessimism Bismarck attempted to control them
both, coalitions and revolution ; and in the end both defeated his successors
between 1890 and 1918. From the foundation of the empire to the first
World War the domestic history of Germany — always closely knit with her
foreign policy — thus takes the form of an unremitting tension between
conservative rigidity and national dynamism. But while stressing this we
must not forget that, given the forces at work about 1870 within Germany
and Europe, no other solution which could have resolved the tension
would seem to have been feasible. It was hard for Bismarck to steer his
course ; he had to consider the European powers, the particularist interests
of the German princes, the Prussian conservatism of his own King
William I and of his own colleagues of the aristocracy, as well as the
divergent party sympathies of the great mass of the people now growing
increasingly politically minded.
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The Imperial Constitution, modelled in all respects on that of the
North German Confederation which he had personally designed and
shaped, was an expression of Bismarck’s perilous course among the reefs.
It was not fashioned in accordance with any logically constructed system;
it was suited to existing conditions in being a compromise between unifica-
tion and federation and between the monarchist principle and the
sovereignty of the people. It made the empire an alliance of constitu-
tional monarchs and also in itself a constitutional monarchy, its apex the
German emperor (the ‘Praesidium of the Confederation’, the Bundes -
prasidium). The empire possessed no comprehensively detailed written
constitution, as did the separate German states; for much was withheld
from the competence of the empire and remained the concern of the
states. Further, to humour these states, especially Prussia and the depart-
mental egoism of her ministers, the creation of imperial ministries was
intentionally avoided. In place of ministries the Federal Council ( Bundes -
rat), the body representing the federated governments, might have been
given not only legislative powers but also through committees some
control over branches of the imperial administration. Though Prussia
held no absolute majority in this Federal Council, she could in fact
scarcely be outvoted. This was the intention of those federalists who were
consistent thinkers. According to a contrary view, the imperial administra-
tion should have been carried on by Prussian ministries. This kind of
‘Greater Prussian’ solution would have been in line with the wishes of the
Prussian Staatsministerium, or cabinet of Prussian ministers. Bismarck
did not expressly reject either solution, for he knew how far-reaching were
the concessions he must make. Some sections of the imperial administra-
tion were made over to Prussian ministries which thereby — especially the
War Office — became quasi-imperial ministries. But in reality Bismarck’s
intention was neither ultra-federal nor along Greater Prussian lines.
From the autumn of 1866 onwards he was secretly aiming at his own
administration for the empire, as extensive as possible and under the
leadership of a single responsible Minister of State who should be none
other than himself. By playing off the allied state governments, the
Prussian king and the Prussian cabinet against each other, as he had
done in the North German Reichstag of 1867, Bismarck achieved what he
had sought — the solution which afforded scope for his own will. He be-
came Federal Chancellor, from 1871 onwards Imperial Chancellor, and
thereby the responsible head of a monocratic government rather than the
head of a plural executive composed of equal colleagues. True, the expres-
sion ‘imperial direction’ ( Reichsleitung ), not ‘imperial government’
( Reichsregierung ), was the one officially used. Bismarck remained at the
same time Prussian Minister-President, that is to say primus inter pares
in the Prussian cabinet, and for the moment also Prussian Foreign
Minister. Although on 1 January 1870 the Prussian Ministry of the
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Exterior became the Foreign Office of the North German Confederation
(and from 1871, of the German empire), it always remained exclusively
Bismarck’s own ministry. In the i87o’s the imperial administration was
rapidly extended in accordance with Bismarck’s design, by the formation
of one ‘imperial department’ ( Reichsamt ) — not ‘imperial ministry’
( Reichsministerium ) — after another. Each imperial department, for in-
stance the Postal Services, the Navy, Justice, the Interior, was under a
Secretary of State without ministerial responsibility.
The ‘responsibility’ of the Imperial Chancellor according to section 17
of the Imperial Constitution was a political and moral conception, and it
expressed the Chancellor’s authoritative position, as Bismarck saw it,
in relation to the emperor’s presidency. There was no responsibility
towards the Reichstag. Bismarck had no wish to be restricted by a parlia-
ment any more than by a body of fellow-ministers. And so the German
empire and its separate states remained true to the typical nineteenth-
century form of constitution in Germany, a constitutional monarchy
ruling without parliamentary control of the executive. According to the
Imperial Constitution the emperor was free to nominate and dismiss the
Chancellor in complete independence of the Reichstag. The Reichstag
possessed legislative powers in conjunction with the Federal Council ; its
position was thus a limited one. It was inevitably granted some import-
ance, however, for the laws of the empire had to be newly created and the
legislature had control over the Budget, including the Army Estimates.
A constitutional monarchy was certainly the form of government that
suited the Germany of 1870. But the tide was running towards demo-
cracy ; this clearly meant that both the Reichstag and the parliaments of the
separate states would in time strengthen their position and would deter-
mine the formation of the government. One of the greatest obstacles to
the alliance of democracy and imperial authority in a parliamentary
monarchy (apart from strong traditional opposition) was the multiplicity
of the German political parties, confusing clear-cut parliamentary de-
cisions and preventing the formation of any stable government majority.
For this reason it was not possible simply to transfer the English type of
constitution to Germany; even the National Liberals, the advocates of
the parliamentary constitution, recognised this directly the empire had
come into being. But the chief hindrance to development along demo-
cratic parliamentary lines lay in the fact that, as the preamble to the
Imperial Constitution declared, the empire was an alliance of sovereigns.
Any strengthening of the Reichstag would inevitably have favoured the
unitary character of the empire — something that the sovereigns and
governments of the separate states were not prepared to tolerate. Bis-
marck had been obliged to yield to federal pressure. As a counterbalance,
however, to federalism, which endangered the unity of the empire, he
made use of the Reichstag, which he found most apt for this purpose, and
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also of the fact of Prussia’s hegemony : she had 65 per cent of the area and
61 per cent of the population of the empire as well as its three principal
centres of heavy industry in the Saar, the Ruhr, and Upper Silesia, besides
many and various very close personal and institutional links with the
empire.
German constitutional history up to the first World War shows how
successfully Bismarck adjusted the balance of his Imperial Constitution,
particularly in relation to federalism. The difficulties with the states in the
North German Confederation were overcome in 1867, and Bavaria and
Wiirttemberg were granted additional special privileges, above all in
military and postal affairs, in 1870; and from then on the history of the
empire contains no serious differences between the empire and the several
states. The Federal Council always supported imperial unity; and this
unity was not endangered by the particularist interests of the several states
because, after the shock that followed his annexation of Hanover, Hesse
(Hesse-Cassel and Hesse-Nassau), Frankfurt and Schleswig-Holstein,
Bismarck was consciously forbearing in his treatment of the states.
A more difficult relationship developed as time went on between the
imperial leadership and the Reichstag. The latter was elected at first every
three and later every five years by universal suffrage, equal, secret and
direct, a method which in the 1860’s Bismarck had considered a suitable
weapon against the liberals. As a result of the plurality of parties, their
programmes dictated by mutually exclusive ideologies, most sessions
yielded variable negative majorities against the policy adopted by the
imperial administration, which was obliged to seek a separate majority
for each bill it proposed. In the first Reichstag, 1871, the National
Liberal party, the party that had supported the founding of the empire,
led by the Hanoverian county squire von Bennigsen, even when joined by
other pro-imperial liberals and the ‘Free Conservatives’ who supported
Bismarck, controlled only a bare half of the seats (168 out of 382). Even
this majority was lost as early as 1874; and towards the end of the 1870’s
Bismarck dissolved his alliance with the steadily declining National
Liberal party and turned instead first to the Centre and the conservatives
and later to the conservatives and those National Liberals who had
severed themselves from their left wing. With these he achieved an
absolute government majority at the Reichstag election of 1887, for the
first and last time.
Since 1867 the National Liberals had been the leading national party
in Germany; they had separated from the anti-government left-wing
liberals, represented in Prussia from i860 onwards by the Progressives, in
order to end the conflict between king and parliament, to effect a compro-
mise with the government in accordance with ‘political realism’ and to
bring the national empire into being. The National Liberals almost
invariably held to this line of loyalty to the empire, though to the end of
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the i87o’s their left wing, led by parliamentarians of note, in particular the
Jewish lawyer Lasker, kept liberal parliamentary demands alert and
sharpened their antagonism to Bismarck to the point of defection from
the party in 1880.
Left-wing liberalism, long under the undisputed leadership of Eugen
Richter (from the Westphalian industrial town of Hagen), had a varied
history of disruption and fusion. It scarcely ever achieved a positive atti-
tude to imperial policy and exhausted itself in mostly negative opposition.
Yet even this party grew accustomed to things as they were and, apart
from late proposals made for instance by Friedrich Naumann, it never did
anything positive to further the political aim of a monarchy under the
control of parliament.
The fact that Bismarck prevented the full realisation of liberal hopes for
the Constitution and that the liberals, once divided, were out-played by
the Chancellor, has led to talk of the ‘tragedy of German liberalism’.
But to understand this tragedy aright we cannot be content merely to
trace the political and ideological struggle between Bismarck and liberal-
ism; we must take into account the social-economic trend towards
organisation and democracy on a scale embracing the masses. What
wrecked the liberals and their ideals was not only a powerful government
but the development towards an increasingly democratic society which
they vainly tried to resist, for instance by opposing universal, equal
suffrage. It was not until the turn of the century that serious and
moderately successful attempts were made to bring about a not very
popular alliance between liberalism and democracy, and to organise the
liberal parties more effectively. Friedrich Naumann, Lujo Brentano, and
Max Weber — this last with the sharp precision of his political theories —
come to mind in this connection.
The Conservatives were split into two main parties. The old Prussian
Conservatives expressed their devotion to the Prussian state and their
aversion from National Liberalism by remaining at first sullenly aloof in
their displeasure at the foundation of the empire. After the reforming of
the party in 1876 (now the ‘German Conservative party’) they followed
the example of the other conservative party, the ‘Free Conservative party’
( Reichspartei ), by turning towards Bismarck. From then on they in-
creasingly supported imperial policy which was swinging to the right —
without, however, having any intention of renouncing their specifically
Prussian characteristics. Their voting strength was drawn almost exclus-
ively from the agrarian territories to the east of the Elbe. Their political
leaders sprang for the most part from among the Prussian aristocracy of
the eastern provinces. Thus from the 1880’s onwards, in the course of the
general trend by which most of the German parties became influenced by
economic interests, they became the party representing agrarian interests
and adopted the aims of the ‘Landowners’ League’, founded in 1893. As
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a result of the ‘Three-Class’ system of voting in force in Prussia up to
1918, the party occupied a much stronger position in the Prussian
chamber of deputies than in the German Reichstag with its democratic
system of voting. After the 1880’s, when Bismarck allowed von Putt-
kamer, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, to carry out his anti-liberal
policy, this party gained and kept power in Prussia, above all controlling
appointment to office. After the liberal era came to an end, offices in the
higher branches of the administration in Prussia were reserved in the main
for the sons of the aristocracy, or possibly for middle-class lawyers who,
by virtue of their conservative political outlook, their membership of some
distinguished Students’ Corps, and their commissions in the Reserve,
were classed with the Prussian aristocracy. Prussia and the empire were so
closely interwoven that the latter was naturally affected by this kind of
personal policy in a bureaucracy which, for all its professional and moral
excellence, could not be called, on an average, politically far-sighted.
Prussian ‘ bureaucratic rule ’ had been specifically liberal in the tradition
of Stein and Hardenberg up to the middle of the century and partly again
in the 1860’s and 1870’s; from the 1880’s onwards it grew increasingly
rigid in its conservatism. Tension between the monarchy, allied with the
aristocratically led society, and the middle-class and proletarian sections
of the community, striving for political responsibility, grew more and
more acute up to the first World War. The justiciary on the other hand
remained politically independent and was more successful in keeping alert
a liberal outlook.
The political and social tension of the times was expressed most clearly
in the growth of the Social Democrats, who became a unified party after
the Gotha Congress of 1875. Their number increased from election to
election in spite of their having been declared ‘enemies of the empire’ by
Bismarck in the Exceptional Law of 1878 on account of their revolu-
tionary programme and their refusal to come to terms with the state. In
1871 they amounted to only 2 per cent of the electorate and had only one
member in the Reichstag; but at the last Reichstag election of the empire,
in 1912, they had increased to 29 per cent of all electors and 28 per cent of
the seats in the Reichstag. This rapid increase was due above all to the fact
that they managed to enlist the new recruits to politics; besides those
workers who were already socialistically minded when the empire was
founded. Social Democracy drew its strength largely from the lower
stratum of people who had left the rural for the industrial areas and who
before they became industrial workers had made no use of their right to
vote. In the end, then, Bismarck was deceived in his hope that universal
equal suffrage would result in loyalist masses supporting the government
and outvoting resistant liberalism.
From 1890 onwards the ‘Social Democratic Party of Germany’
(SPD), its ideologicai basis the popular Marxist Programme of Erfurt
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(1891), became the rapidly increasing party of the masses with a large
membership (just before the first World War close on one million
registered members and four million voters) and a highly developed
organisation. In this and in its closely integrated control over its members
it ditfered from the so-called middle-class parties, which lagged far behind
the SPD in the efficiency of their organisation, discipline and success in
attracting new members. But with the growth in numbers and in the
strength of the organisation came a slackening in revolutionary zeal for
action. Marxist ideology and politico-social reality were obviously at
odds, a fact from which the ‘Revisionists’ under the intellectual leader-
ship of Eduard Bernstein drew their conclusions. These were not accepted
by the party committee and were rejected at the party congress in Dresden
in 1903. Bebel, the party’s head, and his followers wanted officially to
retain the revolutionary doctrine because they felt that it still had force
enough to succeed in the not very distant future. But no revolutionary
strategy or tactics emerged such as those which later characterised the
communism of Lenin. On the contrary, in the Social-Democratic Cate-
chism of 1893 the authoritative party ideologist, Karl Kautsky, wrote of
the ‘democratic-proletarian. . . so-called peaceful method of class warfare’
which he recommended for the party. The SPD was ‘a revolutionary
party, but not a party that makes revolutions’. This laid down the party
line for the whole period from 1890 to 1918.
Organised, ‘peaceful’ class warfare was carried on with success from
1890 by the trade unions, in complete independence of the SPD, in the
favourable atmosphere of a rapidly developing industrial economy. The
German workers, though ready enough to believe the socialist ideology
and to be conscious of themselves as a class, were in practice more
interested in raising their living-standard and in strengthening their
political influence than in revolution. It was much easier to accept
things as they were. In spite of the strength of organised socialism
among the workers, the Germany of 1914 was not on the verge of
revolution, though the voting in the Reichstag, especially in that of
1912, unmistakably revealed a potentially explosive situation. During the
stable conditions of the pre-war years, no outburst could have taken place ;
it needed the growing disasters of the war in its final phase ini9i7toi9i8
to bring this about.
The Catholic party, the * Centre ’, gives us a particularly clear picture of
the special nature of a German political party. As far back as the old
German Reichstag before 1806 the religious Confessions, the itio in partes,
had had some independent existence, and had in special cases broken
through the curial system of the Estates. Since that date opposition
between the Confessions had been sharpened in connection with social
movements. The Centre party, founded in 1870, derived from the Catholic
fraction of the German Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 and the Prussian
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Diet of the i85o’s and i86o’s. It considered itself pledged to conduct a
policy based on the Catholic doctrine of the state and of society, and in
particular to apply it in the sharply strained situation prevailing in 1870.
The general conflict between the Catholic Church and revolution in all its
forms, above all liberalism, mounted to a climax in the 1860’s, and the
Catholic Church’s readiness to fight was emphatically expressed at the
Vatican Council of 1870. But it was the situation in Germany, in parti-
cular from 1866 onwards, that Catholic politicians saw as most dangerous.
Their aim had been a federal Greater Germany. Instead of this, after the
exclusion of Catholic Austria they saw themselves relegated to a minority
first in the North German Confederation and then in the German empire
under a Protestant king and emperor, and further forced into the defen-
sive by the powerful influence of the National Liberals. The Centre saw
it as their mission to oppose every effort towards unification within the
empire in favour of a federalism as far-reaching as would be compatible
with a minimum of imperial authority, to insist on adherence to the pro-
visions of the Prussian Constitution concerning the protection of the
Church, and to promote the adoption of the relevant paragraphs in the
text of the Imperial Constitution. They had already met with some success
in the elections of 1871, but the number of their members in the Reichstag
rose considerably in 1874 as a result of the Kulturkampf, and from then
to the end of the empire the seats held by the party remained constant
at 100. In other words, about 25 per cent of the German Reichstag mem-
bers belonged to the Catholic party, just 37 per cent of the total population
of the empire being Catholic.
Finally, another characteristic of the German system of parties was the
emphasis on a resistant separatism in sharpest contrast to the German
national state. The former kingdom of Hanover had recently become a
Prussian province; and here the Guelf party was a rallying-ground for all
those who wished to voice their protests at Prussia’s annexation of the
kingdom. This, however, was only a dwindling minority among the
inhabitants. The people of Alsace and Lorraine, whose chosen repre-
sentatives had protested in the French National Assembly at Bordeaux
against annexation by the German empire, in a great majority elected
strongly regionalistic members to the Reichstag. These members main-
tained a separatist attitude and so gave proof of a basic conception of
regional autonomy which rejected any unifying national state under either
German or French control. In addition there were always one or two
Danish members from North Schleswig, where, since the plebiscite pro-
vided for by the Peace of Prague (1866) had not been held, the northern
frontier strip by Hadersleben showed a Danish majority. The Polish
‘fraction’ was of greater importance. This usually consisted of from
fifteen to twenty members, and up to the end of the century the number of
voters rose gradually to just 250,000; but in the three Reichstag elections
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of 1903, 1907 and 1912 it soared abruptly to 350,000, 450,000 and
440,000. The main reason for this sharp rise in the decade before the
first World War was the success of Polish agitation among a section of
the Catholic Polish-speaking inhabitants of Upper Silesia; having be-
longed to the Holy Roman Empire for the past 700 years, they had been
moulded by Austria, and then since 1740 by Prussia. These regionalist
party groups taken together always amounted to about 5 per cent of all
electors and from 5 to 10 per cent of the seats in the Reichstag.
The system of voting for the Reichstag did not reflect the will of the
electors in exact proportion, for it was a personal vote with the possibility
of a second ballot in cases where no candidate in the constituency had
secured a majority at the first. Furthermore, the constituencies for the
Reichstag elections, remaining unchanged, ignored the shift of the popu-
lation from the rural areas to the industrial districts. If instead of the
seats in the Reichstag we study the votes at every election from 1871 to
1912, we come on the remarkable fact that the percentage cast for all the
so-called middle-class party groups — despite considerable fluctuation in
individual elections — remained constant. For instance, the conservative
parties (including smaller sympathetic splinter groups which after the
1870’s were weak, with only some 10 per cent of the electorate) kept to a
medium strength with 14-15 per cent of all electors — these and the fol-
lowing percentages apply to all electors, including those who did not take
advantage of their right to vote — while the right and left Liberals, apart
from a period of special weakness between 1893 and 1903, remained
fairly constant at 23 per cent. After the considerable preponderance of
National Liberals earlier on, and the fluctuations of the i88o’s, the two
liberal groups were for the most part equally matched (in 1912, 12 per
cent and 10 per cent). The Centre with a bare 15 per cent of the electorate
and the Separatist parties with their 5 per cent showed a more constant
and consistent representation than did the Conservatives and Liberals.
Contrast with these relatively stable electoral results the rise of the SPD
from 2 per cent to 29 per cent, which closely corresponded to a decline in
the non-voting population from 48 per cent to 16 per cent. The increase in
political awareness measured in terms of the poll corresponded very
nearly with the growth of Social Democracy. Where the decline in non-
voters exceeded the increase of Social Democracy, it was the Centre party
that benefited ; between 1871 and 1 874 it rose from 9 per cent to 1 6 per cent
of the electorate and, as we have seen, it maintained this level.
Thus the parties of the Right, that is. Conservatives and National
Liberals — since the mid-i88o’s fairly consistently ‘loyal to the empire’ and
supporting imperial government policy — together amounted to no more
than a good quarter of all electors, their share of the votes cast declining
in proportion as the poll favoured the Social Democrats and, in 1874, the
Centre. In the first year of the empire the three parties of the Right still
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held 57 per cent of all votes cast, though admittedly they did not go
politically hand in hand; but in the 1870’s and i88o’s, except for their
electoral defeat in 1884, they had only 47-48 per cent and from 1890 sank
gradually to 30 per cent in 1912. And their proportion of seats within the
Reichstag, though usually slightly higher, corresponded to the proportion
of votes. But the Centre too, once the Kulturkampf had died down,
increasingly developed after 1879 into a party ready for collaboration
with the government : under the empire it was already advancing towards
the stabilising role it has played in Germany since 1918. Ranged against
these the Socialists and Separatists, consistent in an opposition based on
principle, increased during the period 1871-1912 from 8 per cent to
34 per cent of the electorate and from 6 per cent to 37 per cent of the seats
in the Reichstag. If we add to these the left-wing Liberals (in 1912,
10 per cent of the electorate and 1 1 per cent of the Reichstag seats) almost
half the voters and members at the end of the empire must be described
not only as in opposition to but as rejecting the Constitution on principle.
This somewhat alarming condition loses some of its political gravity,
however, when we remember two things. In the first place many varied
paths led to and fro between the more pro-imperial and anti-imperial
parties so that shifting combinations were possible; and secondly, the
ostensibly ‘anti-imperial’ parties were all to a large extent accustomed to
things as they were and, rebus sic stantibus, were not in a position to carry
on any active and constructive policy of opposition. It was not until the
first World War that the German parties other than the Conservatives did
anything positive towards political constitutional reform — in particular
towards altering the suffrage in Prussia and stressing the role of the parlia-
ment in the German Imperial Constitution.
The political condition of Germany, one of traditional rigidity strangely
compounded with social unrest, corresponded to the process of social
transformation, and this process and economic development acted and
reacted upon one another. The founding of the empire in 1871 marks no
fresh start in this respect. From the economic point of view it is the period
from 1850 to 1914, not from 1871 to the first World War, that must be
regarded as a whole. This was the period of vast industrialisation in
Germany, the first rapid rise coming shortly before the mid-century and
lasting till the great slump of 1873, the end of the ‘Promoters’ Boom’.
The revolution of 1848 had come as the climax to many years of crises and
at the end of a period of acute hunger; the Bismarckian empire was
founded at a peak of industrial growth and economic prosperity. The
Greater German revolution had come to grief in a period of austerity; the
Lesser German empire was founded in prosperity. There followed after
1873 twenty years in which industry, after periods of sharp depression,
grew more slowly. But from the mid- 1890’s a further vigorous upward
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movement began, and this was maintained, apart from minor crises, till
the outbreak of the first World War rudely interrupted it. By then
Germany, which half a century before had been relatively poor though
extremely active, had taken her place beside the United States and Great
Britain as a leading economic great power. In 1913, 190 million tons
of coal (excluding lignite) and 19-3 million tons of pig-iron were pro-
duced.
Germany’s great coal supplies were amply sufficient and attracted pig-
iron from within the country and from abroad, mostly Sweden, to build up
heavy industry, the main basis of Germany’s economic and military power
at that period. Up till the end of the nineteenth century German economy
was based chiefly on the association of coal and iron; but later, in the
rapid advance after the mid- 1890’s, electricity, chemistry and the internal
combustion engine, with their accompanying industries, also played a part.
The following fundamental facts in connection with German industry
during the period of the German empire were of capital importance in the
political sphere.
Agriculture roughly doubled its yield between 1871 and 1914. This
meant that with strict restraint Germany could just manage to feed herself
without imports for a while. After the mid- 1870’s, however, dependence
on agricultural imports continued to increase; for growing urbanisation
and a rising standard of living brought new and greater demands in
the matter of food; and after the late 1870’s agriculture, in particular
the corn market, felt the pressure of import prices from overseas and
Russia.
Up to the middle of the century Germany had still lacked capital. This
state of affairs altered rapidly during the period of industrial promotion.
Bank stock and industrial capital, closely linked and expanding fast, were
mutually dependent to a very high degree. Opportunities were quickly
sought for investing capital abroad. Germany, till the 1880’s an importer
of capital, now began to export it. In 1913 investment of German capital
abroad was estimated at about 30 milliard Marks. German foreign trade
developed slowly up to 1890, then more quickly up to 1900, and between
1900 and 1914 with a sharp rise; and largely because of capital reserves
abroad it could be maintained at the same level. The vigorous develop-
ment of industry and its share in this foreign trade are expressed in the
proportion of industrial finished goods in the total exports; in 1872 this
was only about a third, but by 1913 it amounted to about two-thirds. This
rise corresponded to the rapid decline in German emigration, which took
place when the long period of prosperity began in the mid- 1890’s. Despite
the rapid growth of the population during the empire (1871-1914) from
40 to 67 million, it was possible from the mid- 1890’s onwards to absorb
this increase within the country and gradually to raise the general standard
of living at the same time.
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The optimism caused by the rising curve of economic expansion found
expression in this increase in the population. From the i88o’s onwards
Germany experienced the slowly onsetting decline in the birth-rate that is
typical of all industrial countries. But it was not till the last decade before
1914 that the birth-rate dropped more steeply to 28 per 1000 (the death-
rate being 16 per 1000). In the years immediately before 1910 the popula-
tion of the empire increased annually by over 800,000; each year the
army’s annual intake was more than double that of France. This was the
period of maximum increase in Germany’s population, and in the first
years of the century its components were particularly favourable: 32 per
cent of the population were young people under 14, only just over 4 per
cent old people over 65. In addition, the population during the decades
of the empire was extraordinarly mobile. More intensive and rational
methods in agriculture caused a shift of the surplus population from the
rural districts (not only of the eastern provinces) to the congested in-
dustrial centres with their growing demand for labour.
The number and the percentage employed in agriculture sank: in 1882
it was 19-2 million or 42-5 per cent; in 1907 17-7 million or 28-6 per cent.
In other words, from the foundation of the empire to the first World War
the proportion of the population employed in agriculture sank from one-
half to one-quarter. Thus the decades of the empire came in the middle of
the so-called ‘flight from the land’, that great impulse that began exactly
at the economic turning-point in about 1850 and has by today brought
about almost the lowest possible figure of approximately 15 per cent of
the population employed in agriculture. The numbers of those employed
in industry show a corresponding rise for the years 1882-1907 (16-1
million or 35-5 per cent to 26-4 million or 42 8 per cent), and so do those in
commerce and transport (4-5 million or 10 per cent to 8 3 million or 13-4
per cent). The great demand for workers made by industry and other
sections of the economy besides primary production could easily be met
during that period out of the surplus streaming in from rural districts,
over-populated till then, or out of the great natural accretion. All this
growth was not only a matter of population ; it distinguished every branch
of the national economy, raised individual standards of living and pro-
duced the beginnings of nation-wide organisation in trade, society and
culture. And with it came a robustly optimistic way of life which,
especially after the 1890’s when the educated middle classes began a lively
criticism of society and culture, was often characterised as materialistic.
The confidence inspired by this rising curve experienced its first severe
shock earlier than this, however, in the great economic crisis of 1873, and
prevailing conditions in the two following decades did little to sustain it.
It is important to stress that Bismarck with his constant burden of
troubles at home was the guiding force in imperial policy for the most part
during years of depression and stagnation, whereas William II’s chancel-
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lors profited by the great economic upsurge. It was a movement which,
while simplifying their domestic policy (despite the rise of social demo-
cracy), also endangered it by creating the temptation to make light of
unsolved problems.
Bismarck’s domestic policy from 1871 to 1890 can, like his foreign
policy, be traced back to one single guiding principle, namely, to make the
empire secure; for its founder was more directly conscious of what
endangered it than were most Germans. They soon grew to regard their
national state, their aim for two whole generations, as an asset to be taken
for granted. Bismarck knew that he waged a constant defensive war, both
within and without, on all ‘enemies of the empire’. It is well known that
in the domain of foreign policy he was always employing novel, bold
methods of diplomacy and alliance for this defensive purpose. He even
toyed with preventive war; but he always remained aware of how un-
reliable this was, and in contrast to Count Moltke, Chief of the General
Staff, and to Count Waldersee, he never seriously wished to make use of it.
His methods for meeting internal political discord were analogous and
this analogy certainly reveals Bismarck’s limitations as a domestic politi-
cian. It is true that, much more than critics then or since will allow, he had
a high sense of his responsibility, which was most deeply rooted in his
Lutheran faith: he was a statesman in the service of a righteous state and
stood above any and every party. But in practice he found himself con-
tinually so hard pressed, fighting on several fronts, that he was always
being forced to take measures which have been justly described in terms
of a ‘domestic preventive war’.
This is particularly true of his fateful decision, in the very year when the
empire was founded and when there was special need for reconciliation
between the denominations, to cross swords with the Centre and so with
the Catholic Church in Prussia. Bismarck, however, had no wish to
mingle in the philosophical warfare of the Liberals with the Catholics, and
the idea of the Kulturkampf was in no way in the spirit of his thought.
(The name Kulturkampf was first used by Professor Rudolf Virchow, one
of the most convinced parliamentarians among the Progressives.) The
Chancellor’s aim was rather to obviate the danger of an alliance of all
Catholic powers, both within and without, against his empire — in other
words a union between Austria, France, where a restoration was possible,
and the Centre and its tactical allies, the Poles and the Guelf party, in
Germany. It exasperated him that political Catholicism, hostile to the
foundation of the empire along Lesser German lines and allied to the
ancient enemy, Austria, had formed in the Centre party a sort of spear-
head in domestic politics. For a Christian denomination to organise
itself into a party seemed to him as disruptive as that one stratum of the
population, the workers, should form itself into a class and organise a
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political party. In this way the Centre and the Social Democrats, though
so opposed, were classed together by Bismarck as ‘enemies of the empire’.
In the interests of the state Bismarck abhorred any mass organisation
claiming autonomy and an international outlook.
His aims in the Kulturkampf were the most radical separation possible
of state and Church, and so of Church and education, and the strengthen-
ing of state control over Church and clergy. These were common ten-
dencies in Europe at the time. Their unusual and exacerbating feature in
Prussia was the aggressive legislation culminating in prohibition and penal
laws. When the clergy resisted the May Laws of 1873, in particular the
‘Law governing the Training and Appointment of the Clergy’, pro-
ceedings were taken against bishops and priests. In 1876 every Prussian
bishop was in prison or had left the country, and very many parishes were
vacant.
Bismarck realised that he had let himself be driven into a hopeless con-
flict. He had believed himself obliged in the interests of the state to take
it up. The same interests led him to look for ways to allay it, after the
1870’s, when he no longer felt any necessity for it. On the contrary; as he
began in 1878-9 to draw away from the National Liberals and to aim at
an alliance with Austria-Hungary, Europe’s chief Catholic power, he
sought the support of the Centre as his confederates. The succession of a
new pope in 1878 favoured this design. Direct negotiations with Pope
Leo XIII, whom Bismarck manoeuvred to separate from the Centre, led
to an ebbing of the strife. In 1879 the Centre gave its support to Bis-
marck’s financial and protectionist policy. But it was not till 1887 that
the conflict came officially to an end, after the controversial laws had been
repealed; and even then important changes such as state inspection of
schools and civil marriage were retained. The quarrel had not ended un-
favourably for Bismarck. But it had its effect on people’s minds for a long
time after. The political Catholicism of the Centre party emerged from the
struggle both confirmed and strengthened.
Bismarck’s preventive war against the Social Democrats failed in a
similar way. After two attempts on the life of the Emperor William I —
though these had nothing to do with the Social Democratic party —
Bismarck ushered in the conflict by presenting a bill ‘Against the dangerous
activities of the Social Democrats ’ in 1878. This measure led to grave dis-
sension among the National Liberals who, though the keenest opponents
of the Social Democrats, had scruples on principle about any Exceptional
Law. It was not until after a dissolution and their electoral defeat that in
the new Reichstag of 1878 they gave their support and the Exceptional
Law was therefore approved. This considerably restricted the scope of
Social Democratic agitation. Meetings and publications were banned,
proceedings were taken against party officials and they were expelled. But
elections and political activity were still sanctioned; and though the police
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in carrying out the law were strict enough to create difficulties and cause
bitterness, there can be no comparison with the harsher repressive
measures of modem totalitarian states. At the same time the twelve years
of the anti-Socialist Act brought greater firmness and clarity within the
Social Democrat party. The period of repression lived on in the socialists’
memory as a ‘heroic age’ (Kautsky). In spite of the Law their numbers
rose, and in 1890 the great increase began that was to make them the party
of the millions.
It would be wrong to think of Bismarck’s actions in regard to the SPD
as showing simply a lack of social responsibility. As early as the 1860’s he
had become convinced that socialist demands could not be ignored and
that the state was in duty bound to tackle the social question. Tactical
considerations had not been the only reason for his brief connection with
Lassalle. In Bismarck’s view the state’s own task of social reform was
linked together with the struggle against the socialists in their refusal to
come to terms with the state. His conception of the state as a ‘continuing
personality’ above all groups and parties is shown most clearly in his
social policy.
Bismarck embarked on a state system of social insurance in the three
famous laws covering sickness (1883), accidents (1884), and old age and
disability (1889). His principle was one of corporate self-help through
insurance contributions by employers and employees, with additional
financial help from the state, which should also make this insurance com-
pulsory by law. He found himself accused of ‘state socialism’ by his
liberal opponents, who rejected any kind of state compulsion or subsidy.
The Chancellor took up the expression and avowed it, prophesying for the
future an increase in inevitable trends towards state socialism. He was
not even averse from some form of nationalisation for the mines. But
these decided steps towards founding the modem state system of insurance
and pensions contrast with Bismarck’s extraordinary reluctance to make
any attempt to protect workers by the prohibition of Sunday work and
the restriction of hours of work for women and children and of working
hours generally. In this Bismarck’s experience as a landowner accustomed
to rural conditions of work kept him faithful to tradition, and he believed
that in this he was not opposing the real interest of the families of workers
themselves.
Both the anti-Socialist Act and the social policy of the state are related
to Bismarck’s political antagonism to liberalism. Here we touch upon
the great combination of influences at work in 1879. This year must be
seen as the decisive turning-point in the economic and domestic policy of
the empire, one which basically determined the whole age of William II.
The immediate occasion for it arose from economic necessity in a double
sense. In the Constitution the imperial finances had received unsatis-
factory and only provisional treatment. The empire could not impose any
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taxes. Even in its first years its meagre revenue, largely derived from the
Department of Posts and Telegraphs, was insufficient in view of the
expanding imperial administration, so that the empire became as it were
the ‘boarder of the states’, dependent on their contributions; and even
these were not enough. A reform of the imperial finances was therefore
urgently needed. Bismarck tried to raise revenue from indirect taxation
and customs dues. For this reason his plans for the imperial finances were
closely bound up with the dispute on free trade or protection which began
in Germany in the mid- 1870’s when the economic depression invited
criticism of free-trade theory and practice. Under the influence of Carey’s
theory the leader of the Free Conservatives, Wilhelm von Kardorff, whose
own business interests were both agrarian and industrial, wrote his
pamphlet Against the Current and in 1876 founded the ‘Central Alliance
of German Industrialists for the Promotion and Preservation of National
Labour’. Kardorff had a decisive influence on Bismarck, who determined
in 1878 to follow the example of almost every other industrial country
except Great Britain by abandoning free trade and introducing fairly high
tariffs. He was all the more determined because, for the first time, not
only the iron and steel industry but agriculture too was calling for pro-
tective duties; with its relatively high production costs it could no longer
compete with the low prices of America and Russia. This was especially
unfortunate since in the mid- 1870’s Germany had become an importer of
com, whereas up till then the economy of the eastern provinces had been
built up on the export of agricultural products. As the export of com
continued to decline, landowners were extremely anxious to secure a
guaranteed home price. In 1878-9 com and iron entered into an eco-
nomic alliance under the slogan ‘Protection of National Labour’. The
objection that the consumers suffered from the rise in prices brought about
by protective tariffs was met by Bismarck with the argument that it was
only through state help that commerce could recover at all, and so once
again afford a basis for employment and increased purchasing power. He
further expressed the hope that the individual states would be able to
lower their direct taxation once it was possible to discontinue or to reduce
their contributions to the empire because the empire had at its disposal a
revenue of its own sufficient to its needs.
Bismarck skilfully made long-term preparations for his tariff and
financial reforms. He first made sure of his finance minister, then of the
Federal Council and finally of the Reichstag, where towards the end of
1878 the ‘National Economic Union’ of protectionist members cut across
almost every party. The Centre was won over. While the National Liberals
split over this question, a completely new one to them, the majority of
them sided with Bismarck despite their liberal tenets. This gave him an
assured majority which lasted through the debates and divisions on the
tariff in the summer of 1879. His dependence on the Centre did however
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jeopardise his chief object, which was that the tariff question should be
effectively bound up with financial reforms. A motion put forward by the
Centre was adopted by which all imperial revenue exceeding 130 million
Marks was annually to be handed over to the several states and by which
the states were bound as occasion demanded to the payment of contribu-
tions to the empire. In this way financial federalism was saved, despite
Bismarck’s intentions, as was parliamentary control of a large proportion
of the imperial revenue. Bismarck had thus won a half-victory only. The
financial constitution of the empire always remained a particularly sore
point. Rising expenditure involved increasing dependence on the several
states and a growing debt on the part of the empire.
After 1879, corresponding to the general trend that was affecting most
of Europe, German agriculture remained dependent on guaranteed prices,
while in industry cartels were formed to protect the new foreign-trade
policy. At the same time the various trade associations grew steadily more
influential, especially those of heavy industry and of the landowners to the
east of the Elbe, whose interests were merged in 1879 though they
subsequently often clashed.
Although Bismarck’s protectionist policy, in a situation allowing him
no choice, had arisen from his economic aims, the consequences in
domestic and party politics were equally important for him. He had been
able half to win over the Centre; the National Liberals, after he had split
their ranks, lost their authoritative influence; and he saw this as a signifi-
cant triumph. Besides, it brought about the ultimate rejection of the
parliamentary system of government which had again been the subject of
negotiations between Bismarck and Bennigsen in 1877. Bismarck’s aver-
sion from parliament and parliamentarians, of which he made no secret,
dates from 1879, and in the sittings between 1881 and 1884, with majorities
against him, Bismarck again and again found himself frustrated by the
refractory character of the Reichstag. His feelings even led him to con-
sider (though never very seriously) an alteration in the Constitution in the
direction of corporative representation.
Taken as a whole, the 1880’s even more than the 1870’s were for Bis-
marck years of hostility and exacerbating friction. There were many
causes for this. There was no reliable majority in the Reichstag, split as it
was into many parties. The European balance, as Bismarck wished to
preserve it, was continually being threatened. Other most important
factors were the wastage of power resulting from the Chancellor’s often
unf ortunate personal policy and the strife between the different genera-
tions of the Hohenzollem dynasty. All this told on Bismarck’s health,
which was always sorely tried and which he himself made worse. He
tormented himself and all who had anything to do with him by his testy
rudeness, his intransigence, his suspicion. His actions were based on the
determination never to become dependent upon anyone. He carried this
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to such extremes that intimate friendship became impossible for him. He
wanted to be in sole command of circumstances, though he well knew the
limited power of a helmsman in these waves — a metaphor he sometimes
used, as for instance in the motto ‘ Fert urida nec regitur’. As the tension
continued he more than once let himself be carried away into using
measures that thwarted his own aims. These included not only instances
of lack of personal consideration in which, ostensibly for reasons of state
interest, he showed contempt either for right or justice, but also basic
decisions of his policy.
It is well to look at Bismarck’s colonial policy in this light. The brief
unheralded era during which Germany acquired her colonies resulted
indirectly from the 1879 turning-point in commercial policy. In 1882 the
German Colonial Union was founded, in 1884 the Association for Ger-
man Colonisation, and by 1884-5 the acquisitions in Africa and the South
Pacific were virtually completed. These were made thanks to a few
enterprising businessmen and to bankers of the Berlin Discount Company,
acting against a background of colonial propaganda that was rapidly
diffused among the middle classes. The imperial administration did
nothing beyond following up private initiative. At first Bismarck held
aloof, for he wished to avoid any international entanglements for this
European empire of his. Next he tried to limit the empire to exercising
only protective authority over the trading companies holding colonial
territory. But this sort of reserve was opposed to the general trend of the
times towards colonisation, in which Germany felt that, even as a late-
comer, she was still entitled to a share. So Bismarck let himself be
carried by the tide, came indeed to do so consciously and deliberately, so
that he could use a national rallying-cry to make his difficult position in
domestic politics somewhat more secure. But he never intended to in-
augurate an imperialist international policy for Germany through the
foundation of colonies. He feared the association of colonial and naval
power, which in fact irresistibly prevailed from the 1890’s onwards.
Even the idea of ‘home colonisation’ in combination with the spread of
German peasant settlement in the areas of mixed German-Polish popula-
tion in the eastern provinces — an idea along national-liberal lines — came
to Bismarck from others, and he only accepted it with some reluctance.
For he still held to the old idea that, though the Polish aristocracy and
their confederates, the Polish clergy, were enemies of the Prussian-German
state, the Polish population, in particular the Polish peasantry, had always
shown themselves to be loyal subjects, as they had recently done as soldiers
in the wars between 1864 and 1871. In yielding to the Germanising
tendencies, which were strengthened after 1894 by the ‘German Associa-
tion of the Eastern Marches’, Bismarck once again accepted a popular
national movement he had originally opposed. In this movement Poles as
well as Germans were now caught up. Since the Kulturkampf there had
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been a hard struggle over language and education, in which the Poles had
been forbidden the use of their mother tongue; and since 1886, when the
Prussian ‘Settlement Commission’ was set up, there was also the fight for
the land. The Poles countered German state aid with their communal co-
operative system, and by keen purchase and settlement of the land they
successfully kept up the struggle down to the end of the empire.
Towards the end of William I’s reign Bismarck scored another great
success in domestic policy with the so-called Septennate Elections of 1887.
Once again home and foreign policy were closely interwoven after the
typical Bismarckian fashion. The military question was the actual and
urgent starting-point. Since the Bulgarian crisis of 1885-6, and in view of
the intensified revanche spirit in France under Boulanger as Minister of
War, Bismarck had been worried by the realisation that in Germany the
build-up of the armed forces lagged behind that of France. France spent
far more than Germany and her conscription was far more rigorous, with
the result that despite a much smaller population her peace strength in
1886 exceeded that of Germany. Bismarck therefore felt obliged to pre-
sent a bill for a 10 per cent increase in the army; like previous army bills it
was to run for seven years, as a ‘ Septennate’. The matter itself was serious
enough, but Bismarck’s chief motive was a tactical one of internal policy
in relation to the Reichstag. The Reichstag rejected the Septennate,
though not the increase in the strength of the army altogether; and this
was what Bismarck wanted. It gave him a favourable pretext for dis-
solving the Reichstag and also a slogan for the new elections: ‘The
Fatherland is in danger.’ It was a great success. The three parties of the
right. Conservatives, Free Conservatives and National Liberals, who
united to form the ‘Cartel’, won an absolute majority of 220 of the 397
seats, to a large extent by mobilising a high proportion of previous non-
voters. It brought considerable relief to Bismarck, though this was short-
lived, as the Cartel broke up in 1890.
A double change in the succession to the throne introduced a new
situation for Bismarck and for the empire in 1888. The Chancellor lost in
William I the royal master to whom he had been bound by what one might
term the loyalty of a vassal, though in decisive situations Bismarck had
always imposed his own superior will. He feared that the liberal-minded
Emperor Frederick III and his ardently political consort Victoria, Queen
Victoria’s daughter and Bismarck’s great opponent, would govern through
a sort of ‘Gladstone ministry’, too anglophile abroad and too liberal at
home, under Freiherr von Roggenbach, a native of Baden. But the
emperor, already mortally ill, died only three months later without having
exerted any appreciable influence. The attitude of his twenty-nine year old
son, the Emperor William II, had been one of sharp opposition to his
parents. In spite of his nimble mind and versatile interests, the dangerous
aspects of his character at once became apparent : unrest and a hunger for
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appreciation, a leaning towards an autocrat’s ‘personal rule’ and, further,
an overestimation of things military and a military tone in society which
reflected his training in a Potsdam regiment of Guards.
The optimistic young monarch, yearning to achieve great things, was
eager for independence. He could not tolerate the old Chancellor, who
was accustomed to his own sole responsibility. This was the fundamental
reason for Bismarck’s dismissal on 20 March 1 890. The court chaplain.
Stacker, head of the Christian-Social anti-semitic movement, and Count
Waldersee, Chief of the General Staff, who in contrast to Bismarck was
working for a preventive war with Russia, were the leading figures in the
intrigues against him. Following a great strike of mineworkers in the
Ruhr (1889) the clash came early in 1890 over questions of social policy,
which the emperor wished to base on measures for the protection of the
workers, and over a dispute about the anti-Socialist Act; Bismarck wished
to extend this in a more acute form while William II hoped to be able to
work towards a reconciliation by repealing it. The Reichstag rejected an
extension of the law ; the Cartel of the three parties of the right disintegrated.
The new elections in February that followed the dissolution of the Reichs-
tag brought a clear defeat for Bismarck and considerable success for the
Social-Democrats and left-wing Liberals. This fact certainly played an
important part during the altercations between emperor and Chancellor.
Bismarck was determined to resist the Reichstag; that is to say, he was
clearly bent for the present on repeated dissolutions of parliament and, if
need arose, would not have shrunk from an alteration in the electoral
franchise and the imposition of a new constitution. Such a drastic line of
action was in complete contrast to William II’s views at that period; and
so, amid bitter and provocative exchanges, Bismarck tendered his resigna-
tion and the emperor accepted it with relief.
It is well known that Bismarck’s dismissal marks in some ways the end
of an epoch in foreign policy: Russia who was seeking an extension of the
‘ Reinsurance Treaty ’of 1887 met with a refusal ; and above all Bismarck’s
artfully contrived diplomacy, denounced by Privy Councillor Holstein as
too subtle ( Finassieren ), was radically replaced by a policy of ‘simplifica-
tion’. But in home affairs, too, the departure of the man who had shaped
the Imperial Constitution to his own requirements was of far-reaching
significance. None of his successors was of Bismarck’s stature; none of
them could fill the position, so dangerously comprehensive, that had been
his within the Constitution. The relationship of the Chancellor’s ‘respon-
sibility’ to the autocracy claimed by the emperor, who was in fact far from
capable of ‘personal rule’, remained undecided. The Reichstag increased
its importance. And most important of all, from now on the political
leadership of the Chancellor on the one hand and on the other of the
departments of the army and the navy, each quite independent, became
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more than before completely disconnected, linked solely now — and most
imperfectly — in the person of the emperor.
Judging after the event one could justify Bismarck’s dismissal by saying
that not only social but also constitutional reforms were overdue,
and that William II, the ‘ social emperor ’ of so many hopes, might have
carried them out. In view of the latent constitutional crisis, was there not
an alternative to the anti-parliamentarian coup d'etat considered by
Bismarck, namely an alteration in the Constitution towards democratic
parliamentary control? This would certainly have involved a political risk,
with the party system as it then was ; but it would have been more suited to
the trend of the times than any anti-democratic course. In the event
William II evaded any constitutional decision. Social reform was half-
hearted ; and no move at all was risked in constitutional policy. It was not
many years after Bismarck’s departure that William II was himself con-
sidering coups d'etat ; and in a speech in Konigsberg on 6 September 1894
he launched the rallying-cry, ill-timed in the romanticism of its sounding
rhetoric, ‘ For religion, for morality and sound order, against the parties
of destruction’ — the plural being used to show that not only the Social-
Democrat enemies of the empire were meant. And so the illusions about a
‘new deal’ soon passed away; and in any case this would have been
beyond the powers of von Caprivi, Bismarck’s worthy successor as
Imperial Chancellor, a model of Old Prussian single-mindedness. The
emperor and his men did not take any notice of critics such as the socio-
logist Max Weber, who in his inaugural address at Freiburg University in
1895 spoke in favour of a powerful national state with an expanding
economy and also made a stern, pessimistic forecast about internal policy.
Friedrich Naumann’s publication with its platform-title Democracy and
the Imperial Dignity, though it made a stir, was not seriously heeded.
Despite his open attitude to modem technology, navigation, artistic and
cultural movements, in his conception of the state and of society the
emperor shut himself off as if at some feudal court, impervious to the
changed social conditions among his own people.
After von Caprivi’s fall in 1894 Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-
Schillingsfurst, a Bavarian noble and a liberal Catholic, an elderly man
unable to take the lead, was Imperial Chancellor for six years. Though
Hohenlohe did not contribute to this result, these were the years that
decided the course the Germany of William II would follow. The eco-
nomic boom had started vigorously and had begun to have effect. The
emperor wanted first to deal with the naval question, in order to adapt
Germany’s position to new conditions. Germany’s foreign trade was
already second in Europe after that of Great Britain, but her navy was
still far behind Britain’s and those of France, Russia, and Italy as well.
Now Germany, belatedly enough, was to join the general trend of ‘new
navalism’. It seemed impossible also to stand aloof from ‘world politics’
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as Bismarck had done, now that, in view of the growing foreign trade and
the colonial footholds newly won, in China and the South Pacific,
Germany’s maritime interests claimed attention. The interrelation of
foreign trade, sea-power and international politics guided the emperor’s
whole statecraft, and his dearest wish came to be to have a powerful
German navy. In this he consciously abandoned Bismarck’s European
policy of a ‘satiated’ empire. If we rightly consider economic facts and
the spirit of the times, we cannot call William II’s decision an instance of
irresponsible pride; it was a recognition of the urgent needs of a new and
rapidly expanding industrial nation by means usual in that day. Germany
was obliged to go beyond the Bismarck scale. But the point was to find
among the new conditions some new scale, and to control the con-
sequences (in particular with relation to Great Britain) that followed
from Germany’s geographical key-position by land and sea. The genera-
tion of William II, schooled politically by such an advocate of the strong
national state and of active international policy as the historian Heinrich
von Treitschke, was incli n ed in its optimistic consciousness of power to
underestimate this basic problem of German politics.
At first it was difficult to carry through this naval policy at home. The
Foreign Office, often subjected to criticism as ‘anglophile’, acted ob-
structively. The imperial chancellor gave way only to the emperor. The
Conservatives, with their largely agrarian interests, remained aloof and
suspicious. Eugen Richter’s Progressives and the Social Democrats
naturally opposed the burden of a large naval programme. And so at the
Reichstag naval debate in the spring of 1897 the emperor’s aims mis-
carried. William II had thoughts of staging a coup d'etat. But instead of
this doubtful step he tried a change of ministers in order to bring about
what he wanted. He appointed Admiral von Tirpitz Secretary of State to
the Navy Office and Count (later Prince) von Biilow as Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs (1897). Later, in 1900, Biilow also became Imperial
Chancellor.
Naval policy developed rapidly after Tirpitz’s appointment and became
a constant source of violent disputes in domestic politics. The industries
concerned supported the Navy League which became extremely active,
inspiriting the Right while it exacerbated the Left. It often made much
wider demands than either Tirpitz of Biilow welcomed. With its large
membership, rising to over half a million, it was the most effective of the
political ‘pressure groups’ which were a counterpart among the middle
classes to the proletarian organisations, the trade unions and the SPD.
The political organisation of the right-wing middle class can be studied in
these associations. Besides the Navy League there were the German
Colonial Union, the Imperial League against Social Democracy, the
German Association of the Eastern Marches, and the Defence League,
which was not founded till a few years before the war. This last worked
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not only for an increase in the army but in practice for its reform along the
lines of national democracy ; for the army through its leaders had main-
tained an aristocratic reserve and in this could be said to lag behind the
navy. There was talk of the ‘ people in arms its duty to wage a ‘ to be or not
to be’ struggle and, in the event of an emergency, to fight for its existence
and national honour. This spirit was foreign and suspect to the body of
high-ranking officers, steeped in Old Prussian tradition, and even to such
a ‘soldier pure and simple’ as General von Schlieffen, Chief of the General
Staff from 1891 to 1905. The ‘Pan-German League’, though relatively
small in membership (before the first World War it never much exceeded
20,000) was the most extreme of these bodies. In the unbridled demands
of its comprehensive nationalism, to which were added elements of a
political Darwinism that was not confined to Germany, this association
was already clearly developing the medley of ‘popular’ ideologies that
later characterised National Socialism. The Pan-Germanists exerted ap-
preciable influence through Reichstag deputies of the right, to a lesser
degree through professors at the universities, and through cross-connec-
tions within commerce and the bureaucracy. The imperial administration
under Biilow and still more under his successor Bethmann Hollweg
(1909-17) saw its agitation as a disturbing element but was unable to avoid
its influence.
We touch here on the central question of the extent to which Germany
before 1914 was impelled by forces leading to war and encouraging the
development of war aims. Certain features in official German foreign
policy show clearly that it had not succeeded in adjusting itself firmly to
the new international political situation in the so-called imperialist age;
and here the emperor’s occasional outbursts of fantastic behaviour were
not without their effects. But in spite of commercial expansion, naval
policy and undertakings such as the Baghdad Railway, there was no real
intention to alter the status quo, let alone to disrupt it violently. To that
extent it was still official policy to regard the empire as what Bismarck had
termed ‘satiated’. It was not the leadership in the government or the
army but a national middle-class movement that provided the motive
power and the dangerous explosive material that were driving the country
beyond this point. In this movement the idealism of the era of classical
liberalism joined with the ambition of successfully expanding commerce
to produce an exaggerated national consciousness and will-power, and —
as it is with suddenly aspiring, ‘awaking’ peoples — this will was so strong
as to involve the danger that sense of principle and proportion would be
lost. This wave of national exuberance broke over even the Catholic
Centre and the parties of the left, though it was often resisted both by
them and at times also, and with firmness, by the old Prussian conserva-
tives.
The year 1906 thus led to a situation in internal politics in some ways
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resembling the Cartel elections of 1887. The Imperial Chancellor von
Bulow, who up till then had managed the parties with some adroitness but
without any real over-all plan, dissolved the Reichstag at the end of 1906,
after the Centre as well as the Social Democrats had refused a supple-
mentary estimate for the expenses of the colonial war in German South-
west Africa, and launched against the Centre and the Social Democrats
his electoral slogan of the ‘ Conservative spirit matched with the Liberal
spirit’. The ‘block’ of the conservative and liberal parties, joined after
Eugen Richter’s death by even the left-wing Liberals, secured half the
seats in the Reichstag at the next election. At long last a combination com-
parable to a government coalition had come into being in the Reichstag.
The so-called ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’ revealed how much the Reich-
stag had by then grown beyond the role assigned to it in the Constitution.
The occasion was an article in the London Daily Telegraph of 20 October
1908, entitled ‘The German Emperor in England’, which quoted remarks
made by William II to the Englishman Colonel Stuart Wortley. The
emperor had expressed his friendly attitude towards Great Britain but in
doing so had tactlessly revived memories of the Boer War. The article at
once raised a great stir, less in England than in Germany. The emperor
had been satisfied with the published text but had shifted the onus by
sending on the text to Bulow for approval. Without reading the article,
Bulow passed it on to the Foreign Office for their attention and then, after
only minor changes, let it go for publication in Germany, still unread by
himself. Here the Chancellor, who happened to be on holiday at the
coast and was preoccupied by the outbreak of the Bosnian crisis, had
acted with very great negligence. The full responsibility was his, as he was
the responsible director of foreign policy alongside the emperor. But after
the first few days public opinion became much more critical of William II
and his misuse of his ‘personal rule’ than of the Chancellor. And Bulow,
though he was conscious of being to blame, dissociated himself from
William II as much as possible in his explanations to the Reichstag. His
chief desire was to extricate himself from the affair with unblemished
character. He promised to see that the emperor ‘in future, even in his
private utterances, observed that discretion which is indispensable both
in the interests of a uniform policy and to the authority of the Crown’.
William signed an undertaking reaffirming the responsibility laid down
for him in the Constitution and assured Bulow of his full confidence. He
had a nervous breakdown and even thought of abdication.
The ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’ almost equals the decisive year 1897 as
the most significant turning-point in the reign of William up to 1914. The
emperor’s self-confidence was shattered and he abandoned his leaning
towards ‘personal rule’. The Reichstag had shown its power and had
reprimanded him sharply. The Imperial Chancellor appeared to have come
off very lightly. But if he had repeatedly shown himself to be astute, he
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had also been morally small-minded; and despite their apparent recon-
ciliation he had lost his sovereign’s confidence. He was dismissed in the
summer of 1909, when the Reichstag rejected the introduction of the first
direct imperial tax, the Death Duty. The Conservatives, the Centre and
smaller groups voted against it. It was almost a case of parliament
bringing about the fall of a Chancellor. The ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’ and
Bulow’s departure mark the beginning of an evolution towards parlia-
mentary authority in the Imperial Constitution, which was an unsettling
factor in the years before the war and which was eventually completed
only under the stress of war in 1917-18.
Bulow’s successor was von Bethmann Hollweg, Secretary of State and
Prussian Minister of the Interior. He was an outstanding administrator
with the widest interests. His insight into Germany’s foreign and domestic
problems was more profound than that of most representatives of the
‘bureaucracy’ of the day. But he was too diffident and not vigorous
enough to assert himself either in the worsening situation in domestic
politics before the war or, later, during the war itself. All he was able to
attempt was to hold the balance between opposing forces. It was with
outward splendour and mounting prosperity but with many of its internal
problems yet unsolved that the empire moved on towards the great world
war — a war which the imperial administration had neither desired nor
prepared for, but which many Germans, sharing the general assumptions
of the Europe of that day, regarded as inevitable.
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CHAPTER XI
THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
I t is impossible to understand the following pages 1 if it is not first
realised that the French in 1871 were dominated by memories of the
peculiarly eventful three-quarters of a century since 1789. The peasants,
who remained by far the largest social group, only slowly absorbed new
ideas. They still feared the re-establishment of an aristocratic and clerical
regime that would reimpose feudal dues and tithes on them; conversely,
they had acquired a very acute sense of their property rights and, particu-
larly since 1848, it had become easy to rouse in them an irrational fear of
‘the Reds’ or the partageux (redistributionists), by whom they meant the
politically more advanced town-dwellers who would come and take away
their land or at least their savings (kept in the famous woollen stockings).
Undoubtedly the landed nobility, still very important in certain regions,
and the upper middle class did not dream of challenging, yet again, either
the freedoms proclaimed in 1789 or even the civil equality consecrated by
the Code Napoleon; but they remembered with dread the Terror of
1793-4. the rising which brought in the July Monarchy, the February
Revolution of 1848 and the rising of June 1848. They consequently
refused all compromise with the new ideas and the popular aspirations of
the nouvelles couches , in which they were incapable of seeing anything
other than purely destructive forces. As for the convinced republicans
(industrial workers, artisans, and many in commerce and the liberal pro-
fessions), their ideal was 1793: the Constitution of the Year One, which
had provided for a very liberal, very democratic, very decentralised
regime, but also the supremacy of the convention and the great com-
mittees ; in other words an all-powerful assembly acknowledging no limit
to its power. On every occasion it was to 1793 that they turned for
precedent and example.
The class-struggle between the workers and the bourgeoisie did not
directly affect a very large part of a country where heavy industry was
not far developed, but it did awaken a considerable sentimental response.
The workers had not forgiven the bourgeoisie, even the republican
bourgeoisie, for the repression of the June risings in 1848, and another
1 It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the history of the Third Republic has not
yet been written, even in part. The numerous books dealing with it have been, until recently,
more often inspired by political preconceptions or the need to provide a general outline than
based on methodical research. In the last few years, however, many research theses have
been projected; obviously, when they are published many questions will be revived. The
present chapter, then, has a provisional character; it is largely based on a personal study of
the sources, for the Boulangist period at least.
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event now roused the old antagonism to its highest pitch: the Paris
Commune.
This last episode is still passionately debated and this is no place to
decide between the opposed theories. The circumstances may be briefly
recalled. Paris had just surrendered to the Germans after a siege during
which her inhabitants had suffered cruelly in body and in mind ; the rest of
France had just elected, as will shortly be described, an assembly with a
royalist majority. After fortuitous incidents that it would take too long to
recapitulate, a popular revolt broke out on 18 March 1871 and the
government of M. Thiers, retreating to Versailles, abandoned Paris to the
rebels. For two months the capital was in the hands of its own elected
assembly, which called itself ‘the Commune’. It is difficult to define the
relative importance in this popular movement of wounded patriotism,
republican anxiety for a threatened ideal, the irritation of the capital
against the provinces which it had long been accustomed to dominate but
which this time imposed their will on it, and, finally, of the misery of the
poorer classes. The socialists, properly so-called, had notable roles in
the Commune but they were only a minority. Nevertheless, it can be
said that when the army under Thiers’ orders reconquered Paris it was
the working-quarters in the east which offered the most stubborn re-
sistance. The reconquest — the Bloody Week of May 1871 — had a
particularly savage character and left an enduring bitterness between
he two adversaries. The partisans of order— the Versaillais — long de-
nounced the Commune for its execution of hostages and the burning
of so many of the monuments in central Paris; they labelled as com-
munards all champions of social reform. On their side the workers did
not forgive the bourgeoisie for the executions and mass-deportations, and
the socialists later adopted the custom of going on a pilgrimage each
year to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, where the last defenders of the
Commune had fallen.
In the rest of France, meanwhile, much was happening. Bismarck had
begun pourparlers with the provisional government which was set up on
4 September 1870. But he would only conclude a peace with a representa-
tive and undisputed government which France would be unable to dis-
avow. Hence it was necessary, in a country to a large extent occupied by
the enemy, to hold hasty elections. These took place on 8 February 1871.
They returned 150 republicans, 80 liberals, 400 royalists, 20 bonapartists.
Given these figures, how was it possible for a republic to be established
within a few years? This apparently paradoxical fact must now be
explained.
To begin with, the elections were essentially fought on the question of
peace or war. Gambetta, the best-known of the republican leaders, was
the embodiment of last-ditch resistance. Those on republican lists very
often made use of his name and his ideas. The conservatives, on the other
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hand, proclaimed themselves the party of peace and took shelter under
Thiers’ prestige. The vast majority of the voters, above all those in the
countryside, being convinced that the war was hopelessly lost, wanted
peace before anything else. Almost nowhere, moreover, had there been
the time or the opportunity to conduct a real election campaign. The
citizens voted for the only candidates they knew, those of the local
notables who were not excluded by the discredit that had fallen on them
for having served the Second Empire; in other words, largely for the great
landowners and lawyers, who were usually conservatives. But as soon as
the Treaty of Frankfurt was signed and the question arose of re-establish-
ing the monarchy, the peasants began to fear that the experiment might
lead to the return of the Old Regime. From that moment republicans
generally won in by-elections.
In the assembly itself the royalist majority was chiefly composed (apart
from fifty to eighty deputies on the extreme right) of liberal conservatives.
They not only did not attack the social achievements of the Revolution,
but were sincerely attached to representative institutions and naturally
drawn to a parliamentary regime. But the legitimist pretender to the
throne, the Comte de Chambord, was a man of the Old Regime. He
claimed power on the grounds of his divine right and not by delegation
from the sovereign people. In fact he would probably have left the new
institutions of post-revolutionary society alone, but he would not accept
that society’s principles, and in France at that moment principles played
an essential part. The clash was symbolised in his wish to bring back the
white banner of Henry IV as the national flag in place of the revolutionary
tricolour. Twice, in July 1871 and in October-November 1873, the assem-
bly was obliged to abandon the attempt to set him on the throne because
it could not obtain from him essential concessions to the spirit of the times.
The royalist majority was reduced to playing for time: for on the death of
the Comte de Chambord his rights and pretensions would devolve on the
Comte de Paris, representative of the Orleans family, heir of Louis-
Philippe and therefore of the Revolution. It was for this reason that the
assembly fixed the duration of Marshal MacMahon’s tenure of power at
seven years, he being a royalist officer who had replaced Thiers as Presi-
dent in May 1873, and undertook the construction of a constitution which
could be adapted to a monarchy in due course.
But it was well aware that it was losing its hold on the country; and,
haunted by historical memories, it considered that its first duty was to
strike at subversive doctrines. As was officially reported to it by Batbie,
one of its most authoritative representatives: ‘There exists in our un-
happy country an army of chaos that is larger and more powerful than in
other countries In 1848 the soldiers of this army called themselves
socialists, in 1871 communards, and today they are usually known as
radicals, a name which, in these latter days, has been adopted to denote
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the League for our Destruction.’ 1 It was for having refused to join battle
with ‘radicalism’ that Thiers was voted down and replaced by Mac-
Mahon, in whose name, from May 1873 to May 1874, the Due de Broglie
presided over the Ministry of Moral Order. This name was exactly
descriptive: the ministry set about defending not merely the interests of
the ruling classes but an entire complex of religious, social and domestic
values that it decided were in danger. But the government had nothing at
its disposal in the struggle against the republican opposition except an
arsenal of bureaucratic vexations that were without serious effect. It did
not offer the nation what was most desired : a road away from provisional
government. It only managed to identify the Catholic religion with
political and social reaction more completely than ever, and to accentuate
the latent divisions in the conservative majority.
It was because of these divisions that the constitutional statutes of 1875
finally established a regime to which the republicans were easily able to
reconcile themselves. The Due de Broglie, leader of the Orleanists, had
envisaged a Great Council as a guarantee of conservative interests, a sort
of House of Lords or Chambre des Pairs. It was to be composed of some
members in their own right and others nominated by the President, and
would serve as a counterbalance to a chamber elected by universal
suffrage, which no one thought of abolishing. This conception was not
retained. The Senate became merely an emanation of the general councils
and the municipal councils. But it remained approximately equal to the
Chamber in power and dignity, and a President of the Republic was set up
who could easily be changed into a king and who had far larger powers than
the monarch had in England at that time. The President of the Republic
had initiative in introducing laws; he could exact from either house a
second deliberation if a measure displeased him; he could dissolve the
Chamber on the advice of the Senate. He chose the ministers ; these were,
it is true, responsible to the houses, but it was not made clear whether
their responsibility was individual or collective; no Prime Minister was
foreseen. All in all, nothing forbids the supposition that the Constitution
of 1 875 could have evolved towards a Presidential system like the American,
and it is to be noticed that progress towards such a system had already
been made when, from 1871 to 1873, Thiers was in power.
But events decided otherwise. The Chamber of Deputies elected in
March 1876 when the conservatives were in confusion, had a republican
majority; President MacMahon and the Senate remained conservative.
The work of the ministers became gradually impossible in these condi-
tions; on 16 May 1877 MacMahon dismissed them and, on the Senate’s
1 French text: *11 existe dans notre malheureux pays une armee du d£sordre plus
nombreuse et plus puissante qu’ailleurs. . . .En 1848, les soldats de cette armee s’appelaient
socialistes, en 1871, Communeux, et aujourd’hui on les nomme plus ordinairement radi-
caux, nom qui, dans ces demiers temps, a 6t6 adopte pour designer la ligue de la destruc-
tion.’
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advice, appealed to the country by dissolving the Chamber. The Seize mai
was not, as was alleged in the heat of battle, a coup d'etat : the President
had not exceeded his constitutional powers. But in the circumstances his
action looked like a defiance of the universal suffrage. The elections, in
spite of government pressure, confirmed the republican majority. Mac-
Mahon, when receiving a ministry acceptable to the new Chamber, was
obliged to declare in a message: ‘The Constitution of 1875 founded a
parliamentary Republic when it established my irresponsibility at the
same time as it instituted the collective and individual responsibility of
ministers.’ 1 It was this interpretative text that really established the
parliamentary system.
In January 1879 a partial renewal gave the Senate a republican majority
and MacMahon resigned and was replaced in the Presidency by the
republican Jules Grevy. The convinced republicans, ‘republicans by
birth’, were thenceforward masters of the Republic. The vital task to
which they set themselves without delay was that of ‘laicising’ public
authorities. This is a notion whose meaning is difficult to grasp unless it is
borne in mind that the greater part of the country was Catholic. It must
be remembered that the Roman Church is a very hierarchical organisation
based on the principle of authority, and charged with the upholding of
immutable dogmas. In 1864 Pope Pius IX had published the Syllabus, a
catalogue of errors condemned by the Church, and this publication had
been interpreted by many as Catholicism’s declaration of war on modem
thought, on the scientific spirit, on democratic freedoms, on the principle
of popular sovereignty. Whether this interpretation was well-founded is
debatable; but it was adopted by most of the republicans, who were thus
led to see in the Catholics their natural opponents. Besides, many of these
republicans were without any religious belief, and aspired to build a new
world in which Science would replace Faith. To attain that end it was first
necessary to remove education from the control of the Church.
In France primary education was one of the responsibilities of the
communes; and very often it was given by members of the religious ‘con-
gregations’, monks or nuns. For boys’ secondary education Napoleon I
had created state lycees, besides which there were religious colleges run,
among others, by the Jesuits ; but girls for whom more than an elementary
education was wanted were brought up in convents. Only higher educa-
tion was entirely the affair of state faculties. At first an attempt was made
to forbid members of unauthorised congregations to teach; then, this
measure having been rejected by the Senate, they were expelled, the
Jesuits being conspicuous among them. Secondary education for girls
was begun in the form of state lycees analogous to those for boys. Finally,
1 French text: ‘La Constitution de 1875 a fonde une republique parlementaire en
etablissant mon irresponsabilite, tandis qu’elle a institu6 la responsabilit6 solidaire et
individuelle des ministres.’
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in 1882, state education was proclaimed to be ‘laic’, that is, not merely
neutral but divorced from all religious ideas; religious teaching might be
given by ministers of the various sects, but outside school hours and
without relation to the rest of the teaching. Jules Ferry gave his name to
most of these reforms, but he was supported in putting them through by
many earnest collaborators, and was energetically backed by almost all
the republicans. Nor were the school laws presented as an oeuvre de
combat only. To make primary education free and compulsory was
thought of as a patriotic action which would enable the French to rival
‘ the Prussians ’ (it was said that Prussia had conquered France thanks to
her schoolmasters). It was thought too that here was realised a social
reform par excellence , one that would assure to all citizens equality of
opportunity. Nevertheless, the ‘laic’ laws were perhaps most important
in their political consequences. They deepened the gulf between the ‘two
Frances’ so that in many villages the republican party was thenceforward
‘ the schoolmaster’s party ’ as opposed to ‘ the priest’s party ’. And the new
primary education played a very large part in determining the ideological
and political alignments of the Third Republic. At the same time the
government lavishly dealt out fundamental freedoms: freedom of the
press (for the future, breaches of such regulations as remained were to be
tried by jury) and liberty of assembly. Only freedom of association,
though recognised in practice, was not yet allowed in law, for it raised the
problem of what to do about the ‘congregations’. A law was passed con-
ferring the nomination of mayors hn municipal councils, though it is true
that central supervision was retained.
But even while this considerable work was being done a deep split
appeared among the republicans that was to dominate political life until
the end of the century; the ‘Opportunists’ — whose various leaders held
office until 1885 — were opposed by the ‘Radicals’. At first it was a tactical
conflict. Many republicans, reckoning up the difficulties the Republic had
had to overcome to establish itself, thought it necessary not to disturb
a still largely uncommitted public opinion, above all in the countryside:
their formula was, ‘Nothing must be put in the republican programme
that the majority of the nation cannot be induced to accept immediately ’.
To this the Radicals or ‘Intransigents ’ replied by another: ‘The complete
application of republican doctrine must be demanded, and no point of the
programme must be renounced until proof has been given that the nation
does not want it.’
This tactical disagreement corresponded, to a certain extent, with the
conflict of generations. The Radicals, men of principle, often sentiment-
alists, were the heirs of the ‘Republicans of 1848’ (it was one of the latter,
Louis Blanc, who founded their first parliamentary group); they found
recruits among veterans and among the young men who naturally went to
extremes. The Opportunists often belonged to the intervening generation
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which had been moulded in the straggle against the Second Empire by the
process of exploiting to the utmost the half-freedoms that were all that
then remained. This was a more positive, more realistic generation, living
more in the present and considerably less upon the memories of 1793.
Above all there was a difference of temperament and mental habit. For
the Opportunists, to govern was to do the nation’s business, to deal with
problems as they arose : they were empiricists. For the Radicals, to govern
was to reform. Both were anti-clericals and believers in science, but the
Radicals commonly hoped that science would give laws to human society
like those which governed the universe, while the Opportunists borrowed
from the methods of scientific research those of ‘ experimental politics ’.
Matters were, of course, made more confused by individuals. The first of
the great Opportunists, Leon Gambetta, was leader of the Radicals until
16 May 1877: his supple Mediterranean intelligence and heated eloquence,
his ample endowment with what the French call sens de V£tat, enabled
him to excel in disguising the most moderate and practical of proposals in
the cant of the most extreme republicanism. He, perhaps, could have
made straight the highway which the republicans had to travel from their
past in opposition to their present as the party of government; but the very
force of his personality gave his enemies opportunities to accuse him of
‘caesarism’: and he died prematurely in December 1882. His political
heir, Jules Ferry, was a quite different character: an Easterner, cold,
reserved and frequently abrupt in manner, he made the mistake of making
all too clear what he would have done better to have left obscured: once,
for example, when he was denouncing the unrest and excesses of the
Radicals, he used a phrase that was immediately taken up as ‘the danger
is on the left’, which was at the time, for many republicans, inconceivable,
almost monstrous. It should be added that the impetuosity and entire
character of the Radical chief, Clemenceau, who was called, with some
exaggeration, ‘the destroyer of ministries’, did not make for calm either.
The attack on Gambetta’s dictatorial bent and the hatred felt for Ferry
were basically expressions of the contempt felt by many for those who had
abandoned a large part of the original republican programme, that on
which Gambetta himself had been elected in 1869 at Belleville (the
Parisian equivalent of Whitechapel). It is in fact true that although the
Opportunists put through many far-reaching reforms they dropped many
others.
Many republicans held that, power having been secured, it was neces-
sary to destroy the monarchical Constitution of 1875 and the system of
administration which had hardly changed since the First Empire; the
Belleville Programme had even included a proposal that all public func-
tionaries should be elected. Extreme republican hostility was vented
above all on the Senate, the Prefects, and the Council of State. The
Opportunists, however, made a very limited revision of the Constitution
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in 1884 and were thereafter its determined defenders; in particular they
regarded the Senate as a useful institution, as a brake on the occasionally
thoughtless impulses of the Chamber and as a faithful picture of those
country voters whom they were especially afraid of alarming and alien-
ating from the Republic. The Napoleonic centralisation also had its good
points in the republicans’ eyes as soon as they controlled it: if they
destroyed it they would leave the monarchists free to make themselves
masters once more in a whole series of departments, where the applica-
tion of ‘laic’ laws in particular would become impossible. The election of
judges, the only measure in this direction which they ever seriously con-
templated, was also abandoned in the end — in July 1 882. Thus, little by
little, a regime was consolidated which was very unlike that of which the
most enthusiastic republicans had dreamed.
Understandably enough the Opportunists attached great importance to
material interests and to economic prosperity. But they had a great stroke
of historical bad luck in that it was precisely during their period of power
that there occurred one of the worst and longest crises that the French
economic system has ever had to endure. This crisis was linked with the
depression that affected many countries, especially in Europe, from 1873
to 1896, but it had its individual characteristics. For one thing, the inter-
national crash in 1873 only slightly affected the French economy: in
France the prosperity of the Second Empire lasted until 1882. But that
year did not merely introduce a procession of difficult years; stagnation,
and in many areas regression, began which lasted until 1895 at least. This
was a handicap compared to other leading nations which some would say
that France did not overcome until recent years. To give only one
example, France was alone among the great industrial countries in having
fewer exports in 1895 than in 1875 and 1883.
The first cause of the crisis was agricultural. Agriculture, easily the
country’s principal economic activity, suffered acutely from the competi-
tion of new producers, those of wheat especially, the price of which shrank
by half between 1871 and 1895. At the same time France’s other great
crop, the grape, suffered a real disaster, the phylloxera invasion which
ruined one region after another. As a natural consequence the ruined
farmers bought less from industry.
But French industry was hit in other ways as well. Its most important
branches had derived their reputation and their prosperity from pro-
ducing luxury and quality goods ; in many cases the principal advantage
over competitors lay in the ‘ know-how ’ and good taste with which workers
who were essentially craftsmen carried out their work. They served,
especially the export industries, an aristocratic clientele. But as the century
drew towards its end the world grew more democratised; luxury declined,
especially in the years of the depression. Expensive articles of high
quality were abandoned in favour of mediocre articles costing less, made
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with less skill, and more and more often by machines. These consumer
goods of mediocre quality were the very ones which the newly industri-
alised countries, particularly those of central Europe, set out to produce.
The fabrics of pure silk or pure wool, the pride of French industry, were
rivalled by fabrics made of mixtures — silk and wool, wool and cotton, silk
and cotton. The leather industry abandoned strong hides for lighter ones,
and furthermore the great cattle-raising countries of the Americas in-
creasingly took to working their leather themselves. France was ill-
adapted to this development because of her traditions, because of those
very high qualities (and, in certain cases, the consequent relatively high
wages) which distinguished her craftsmanship. Many manufacturers
thought it degrading to fall in with fashions which they believed to be
transient and which they denounced for being in abominable taste.
But, above all, France was ill-equipped for mechanical production,
which needed a great deal of plant, metals, and power. At the end of the
nineteenth century the dominance of coal was at its height, and France
had very little of it. What was perhaps even more serious, the price of
mining even such coal as there was was prohibitive : in the most important
French field, that of the Nord and of the Pas-de-Calais, exploitation was
much more difficult because of the depth and geological faults of the
strata; the fields of the Massif Central were far from the chief centres of
consumption and, there being no navigable waterways in the area, the
railways had to be used, at a far higher cost. As a result France was the
only leading industrial power whose production of coal was permanently
and markedly inferior to her consumption of it, however low the latter
was. The consequence was that her metallurgical production scarcely in-
creased at all before 1895, while that of Germany tripled and that of the
United States quadrupled. As to British metallurgy, it remained four times
as important as the French throughout the period. Since the Second
Empire France had been the second financial power in the world, the
second creditor country; but as time went on it became increasingly clear
that she lacked the material foundations of power because of her poverty
in minerals.
There was another fundamental cause of French economic stagnation.
Since about 1825 population growth in France had steadily decreased.
The annual excess of births over deaths for 10,000 inhabitants fell from
sixty-seven in the period 1821-5 to twenty-seven in the period 1881-5.
This phenomenon was different in kind from that which became observ-
able in the most economically advanced countries after 1920, notably
Great Britain; for in France the collapse of the birth-rate came well before
the triumph of material well-being and the modem way of life, instead of
following it. The causes of this considerable anomaly have not so far been
explained satisfactorily. Its repercussions, on the other hand, are per-
fectly clear : France was deprived of the stimulus given by the emergence
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of new consumers who quickly became new producers as well. The great
economic crisis in its turn gave a sharp setback to demographic recovery :
the annual excess of births over deaths for every io,ooo inhabitants fell
from twenty-seven in the period 1881-5 to twelve in the period 1886-90,
then to three from 1891-5, and rose only to sixteen from 1896-1900.
France was caught in a descending spiral, so that population, markets and
production all shrank. It is not too much to see in this period the begin-
ning of an enduring decline rather than a transient crisis.
The effects of the great economic depression were persistent and of
great importance in many fields. In agriculture it was at first the great
landowners who were chiefly hit. They were affected simultaneously by
the collapse of land- values and the fall in rents; the political decline of the
‘Notables’ was thus accentuated by their economic decline. At the same
time the exodus to the towns of landless peasants, ‘journaliers’ (day-
labourers) and ‘domestiques de ferme’ (farm-servants) increased. The
number of peasant proprietors cultivating their own land rose steadily,
but this development, joyously hailed as a token of social and political
stability, was not always a sign of economic progress. On the contrary,
the solvency of the peasant smallholding proved not that it was in a better
condition to stand up to competition, but that the peasant family was
living off its farm, producing a little of everything for its needs, only
buying and selling the minimum. As for the industrial workers, if their
wages on the whole remained stable or even increased, many of them
suffered prolonged unemployment; and, in spite of the shortage of
statistical evidence, it seems nevertheless that in several of the most im-
portant branches of industry the number of workers in effective employ-
ment declined to a lasting extent. Commercial professions, however, were
inflated by those who abandoned agriculture and industry for these
havens. It is still true today that the excessive importance of the trading
sector, and the high prices that are the result, constitute one of the heaviest
burdens which the French economy has to carry.
The length and the gravity of the crisis contributed also to the dis-
couragement of any enterprising spirit in France. The country shrank back
into its shell. The most obvious indication of this state of mind was the
triumph of Protectionism. Already in 1885 and 1887 tariffs on cereals and
cattle had been raised. In 1892 a new, general, tariff was adopted, the
Meline Tariff, which not only increased the customs dues on a large num-
ber of products, but severely restricted a government’s freedom of action
in the negotiation of commercial treaties.
The political consequences of the economic crisis were no less im-
portant. They first made themselves apparent in the 1885 elections. In
these the conservative vote, which had shrunk considerably in 1881, rose
again almost to the 1877 level. It was swollen not only because of
Catholic resentment at the ‘laic’ laws, but because the peasants had been
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successfully persuaded that the farmers’ woes were the doing of the
republican governments, whose financial management was especially
under fire. On their side the Radicals more than tripled their number of
seats, largely by exploiting the workers’ sufferings and the difficulties of
the small tradesmen in the big cities. It is also true to say that both of
these forces drew strength from the mistakes, real and rumoured, of the
Tongking expedition; but colonial policy did not produce any political
re-grouping: those who attacked it were already opponents of the Op-
portunist governments over questions of home politics.
The practical result was that the Chamber elected in 1885 was without a
majority : three opposing tendencies, Opportunist, Radical, Conservative,
commanded almost equal forces. The resulting impotence soon provoked
a strong anti-parliamentary trend, and this was one of the leading factors
in the Boulangist movement.
Nothing could be more mistaken than to see in Boulangism an attempt
at a military pronunciamiento ; nor was it, in origin at least, to any greater
extent a plot of the right to overthrow the regime. As for the interpretation
which makes it the expression of a nationalist and ‘revanche’ state of
mind, one thing must be made clear. The hope of military revenge for the
defeat of 1870 was from an early date the hope of a small minority only,
the great majority of Frenchmen having judged that Germany was much
too strong for an isolated France. Many, however, believed — wrongly—
that Germany was only waiting for an excuse to complete her victory of
1870 and dismember France. Thus nationalism was no more than a
defensive reflex, which changed easily enough, nevertheless, into the
hysteria of the besieged. This was exactly what happened in 1887, when
Bismarck saw fit to rattle the sabre in order to obtain a complaisant
Reichstag that would vote his septennial military law. When, following on
this, there were several frontier incidents, above all the Schnaebele affair,
Boulangism was naturally strengthened.
But Boulangism was first and foremost a popular movement of the
extreme left ; it even had a socialist side. The political career of General
Boulanger began with the attempts of advanced republicans to democra-
tise the army. The army of the Second Empire was founded on the long-
term service of a certain number of conscripts chosen by lot; the republi-
cans, at that time in opposition, demanded the suppression of the regular
army, the chief support of personal power, and its replacement by a
militia. The war of 1870 put off this plan by making them take into
account the necessities of national defence; but they did at least demand
short-term conscription, the same for everyone, which would make it
impossible to use soldiers against other citizens. The military law of 1872
only partly satisfied them: universal conscription was introduced, but
while it remained fixed at five years’ duration for the greater number of
men, a much shorter time was laid down for those privileged by the
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selection system, by wealth and by education; and those who were to be
teachers or — far worse ! — were to go into the Church were wholly exempt.
Republicans set out to bring the law into harmony with their principles.
Besides, the army was increasingly becoming the refuge of the sons of
the great royalist and Bonapartist families, effectively excluded from many
administrative careers since 1879. True, these officers did not dream of
using their commands to re-establish monarchy by force, but they rebelled
against the Republic in jeers, and quite often republican or non-Catholic
officers were discriminated against or sent to Coventry. This situation,
too, needed reform.
It was in order to perform this double task that in January 1886
Boulanger was imposed on the government as Minister of War by the
Radicals. While holding that office he busied himself with the well-being
of the common soldier, which earned him great affection on the part of the
masses. Many of the professional officers, on the contrary, disliked him
immensely, forgiving him neither his careerist thirst for publicity nor the
way in which he disciplined some Conservative officers who gave way to
untimely displays of feeling. On their side the Opportunists were angered
by his flaunting of his Radical alliance, and from the summer of 1886
onwards Jules Ferry was at war with him. In the spring of 1887 Opportu-
nists and Conservatives, exploiting the indiscretions into which, during
the period of Franco-German tension, Boulanger’s impulsive tempera-
ment had led him, formed a coalition to drive him from power. Many
Radicals thought that this manoeuvre was directed against them. They
violently attacked ministers among whom General Boulanger was no
longer numbered, and who could only survive by grace and favour of the
right. Boulanger, moreover, did not resign himself to a disappearance into
obscurity. New outbursts on his part got him dismissed from the army.
At that moment he was put up as a candidate in several by-elections as a
form of protest against Opportunist politics ; and a large part of the right
worked in support of him, more or less behind the scenes, in order to
make republican confusion worse. Thanks to the backing of the right and
of the extreme left Boulanger won sensational election victories. Most
notably, he was twice elected in the Nord department (April and August
1888) and once in the Seine (January 1889): in other words, he built up a
majority in the two largest departments in France that were also the most
industrialised. In broad outline his programme was of a piece with the
old Radical demands: he wanted the revision of the Constitution by a
Constituent Assembly, and his followers, veteran Radicals, explained to
the workers that the suppression of the Senate would remove the chief
obstacle to social reforms that would put an end to all their distresses. As
for the alliance with the royalists, who were supplying the money to pay
for the Boulangist propaganda, it was of course kept secret.
The Radicals, in deep disagreement and confusion, were in no condition
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to fight Boulangism effectively. It was an Opportunist government which
took on the job. It frightened the ex-general into inglorious flight to
Belgium and then to England; and it arraigned him, along with his chief
supporters, before the Senate constituted as a Supreme Court of Justice.
In the elections of 1889 only a few dozen Boulangists were elected (chiefly
in Paris, which had been previously a Radical stronghold) and the
republicans kept their majority. The regime emerged strengthened from
this adventure, which did, however, have important consequences. The
Radicals had been severely shaken: their chief proposal, constitutional
revision, was discredited because of the use to which the Boulangists had
put it. The Conservatives, by allying with Boulanger, had sacrificed their
principles, and their shady collaboration had, in the end, been exposed ;
furthermore, they no longer had any reasonable chance of overturning the
Republic, and the young who had followed them up to this time now
risked travelling down a road with a dead end. As a final consequence
many workers suddenly abandoned the traditional republican parties : this
was an ominous indication of the future.
But for the time being the Opportunists, reinvigorated by their victory
over Boulanger, continued to hold power almost uninterruptedly from
1889 to 1898. By French standards this was a period of governmental
stability: two ministries of this period had lives of two years each. It was
also a period rich in achievements. After long negotiations the Franco-
Russian Alliance was brought into being, so that French isolation was at
an end and the Republic had achieved some sort of definitive recognition
from the European monarchies. The policy of colonial expansion also
triumphed, after so much previous disputation. It was also at this time
that a large part of the edifice of French social legislation was erected.
Although previously no four years’ legislature had produced more than
five new social laws, fifteen were passed between 1889 and 1893, and
seventeen between 1893 and 1898. This point, seldom made, deserves
attention.
The workers — those, at least, who lived in the large towns — had always
been among the firmest supporters of the republican party. When newly
returned to power, the party naturally had a marked sympathy with their
problems and was prepared to give them what they wanted ; besides, it was
preoccupied with the manifest contrast between political equality, one of
its fundamental principles, and economic inequality. In this respect there
was no very profound difference between Radicals and Opportunists. The
latter often let themselves be guided by ex-working men who had grown
into political moderates, but who nevertheless remembered their experi-
ences and problems as workers : Martin Nadaud, the mason, who became
a deputy and one of Gambetta’s advisers; Tolain, the bronze-founder,
who had played a very important role in 1864 in the beginnings of the
autonomous Workers’ Movement and had now become a senator and one
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of the Opportunist leaders in the Seine department. Conversely, some
Radicals, like Yves Guyot, figured among the most determined champions
of laissez-faire economics and in their name fought against any state inter-
vention in working conditions.
But the French republicans lived in a country where the growth of
heavy industry was particularly slow, and only slowly did they become
aware of the new problems such growth creates. Children of a world of
peasants and artisans, they were all too ready to suppose that universal
education and the setting-up of free workers’ associations, which were to
become, little by little, substitutes for employers, were the real answers to
the social problem. They had plainly been influenced by the great French
socialist thinker Proudhon. In order to put his ideas into practice they
had made primary education compulsory and, in 1 884, given legal recog-
nition to trade unions. To grasp the importance of this last action, it
must be remembered that the Republic had not established freedom of
association because of the governing party’s fear that it would protect the
religious congregations; and, according to the penal code, all associations
consisting of more than twenty people had to be submitted to govern-
mental approval. The trade unions, therefore, were now in a privileged
position.
Many other social proposals were discussed between 1880 and 1885,
and were even passed by the Chamber. But they were thrown out by the
Senate, representing the rural voters ; these either had no idea of the needs
of the new urban and industrial society or even rebelled against the notion
of giving privileges to townsfolk from which they would not profit
themselves.
The years from 1885 to 1889 were, in this field as in others, almost
barren, but it was probably during this period that the movement of
opinion quickened and that many problems grew acute. To begin with,
the trade-unions law of 1884 did not have all the expected results. In
many places the setting-up of unions was met by the steady opposition of
the employers; the ‘associations ouvrieres de production’ remained more
of a dream than a reality; the repercussions of the economic crisis made
the workers more impatient and reform more urgent ; and in the eyes of
the politicians the Boulangist bid underlined the reality of the danger.
Consequently, the Opportunists, in power again from 1889 onwards,
threw their weight behind the reforming movement and forced their will
on the Senate which, being of their own political persuasion, had neither
right nor reason to distrust or obstruct them. As early as 1890 the livret
ouvrier (worker’s pass), a survival of the Empire’s policing methods, was
abolished, and a law was voted which provided for workers’ delegates
whose business would be to ensure that rules for hygiene and safety in the
mines were observed. This law was extended in 1893 to all industries; in
1891 the working-time of women and children was shortened by law.
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1898 at last saw the passing of a law on accidents at work; it had required
long gestation for it was necessary to abandon the principle of civil
responsibility in common law and create the notion of professional risk.
Finally, in 1891 Freycinet’s Opportunist government launched a project
of workers’ pensions that was only completed twenty years later.
While the Opportunists thus ensured that, in spite of many surface
incidents, government should really be stable, the bases of French political
life were being profoundly changed. Up to that time France was sharply
divided into two camps : on the one side the republicans, who, whatever
their disagreements about particular issues, were all believers in the same
fundamental principles: in political freedom; in loyalty to the democratic
system as something capable of solving all problems and something that
made any new revolutionary violence illegitimate; in ‘laicism’ which
really meant ‘anti-clericalism’. All the republicans were ready to forget
their quarrels and unite whenever it seemed that the Republic was in
danger. Opposing them was the irreconcilable right, whose political and
social conceptions were undoubtedly far from harmonious, but whose
principal bond was the defence of all that was Catholic. But from this
time efforts were to be made to obliterate the great division between
Frenchmen by the Ralliement (rally) of the Catholics to the Republic.
And on the other hand a political factor appeared that became steadily
more important, a socialist party which, in theory at least, repudiated the
‘Bourgeois Republic’ and worked for the new Revolution, the Social
Revolution.
The Catholic ‘Rally’ to the Republic was the result of several factors.
There was, first, the natural weakening of the conservatives as the future
was closed to them : the more time passed the slighter grew their chance of
regaining power, and the failure of Boulangism was the last straw.
Already after the elections of 1885, and again after those of 1889, tenta-
tive efforts had been made to create a ‘ constitutional ’ right which accepted
the existing institutions ; but they were as yet too timid, and did not get
many supporters.
The decisive role was played by Pope Leo XIII, a man remarkable for
his flexible mind and clear-sighted political ability. Reacting against the
common interpretation of the Syllabus he declared, in the Encyclical
Libertas in 1888: ‘It is a vain and baseless calumny to allege that the
Church looks unfavourably on most modern political systems and rejects
all the discoveries of contemporary genius together.’ In consequence the
French Republic was not in principle more unacceptable to him than any
other regime. Besides, he was well enough informed of the situation in
France to decide that the Republic had a long life ahead of it, and that by
persisting in an intransigent opposition the Catholics would hurt nobody
but themselves. In February 1884 Leo XIII published the Encyclical
Nobilissima Gallorum Gens in which he insisted on the necessity of pre-
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serving the Concordat of 1802. Little by little circumstances began to
favour him. After the last of the great ‘laic’ laws had been passed in 1886,
anti-clericalism no longer had a definite object with which to rally the
republicans: for the further step of the separation of Church and state, in
other words the denunciation of the Concordat, though always demanded
by the Radicals, was rejected by the Opportunists. Meanwhile the eclipse
of Boulangism must have convinced royalists of the vanity of their hopes.
Leo XIII, then, was seeing how the land lay. In this spirit Cardinal
Lavigerie, Primate of Africa, when receiving some naval officers in 1 890,
proposed a toast to the Republic. This initiative provoked violent reac-
tions. Not only were the royalists indignant, but the Catholics, and above
all the bishops, attacked the Republic as the persecutor of the Church.
However, after some time had passed, Leo XIII returned to the charge.
In February 1892 he published, in French, the Encyclical Au milieu des
sollicitudes in which he declared that all the established governments were
legitimate; Catholics must devote themselves to modifying legislation.
At the same time the pope let it be understood that he did not want the
formation of a Catholic party which would again involve the Church in
French political struggles, but a big government party with no confes-
sional character, which Catholics could enter and which would drive the
doctrinaire anti-clericals back into opposition. The royalist deputies of the
right replied in June 1892 with a resounding non placet : they declared that
though, as Catholics, they owed obedience to the pope in all matters of
faith, as citizens they needed to take nobody else’s advice as to their political
conduct. Nevertheless, a certain number of them did retire from political
life. The result of all this was a deep split in the right. In the 1893 elections
only thirty-five of the ‘Catholic Rally’ candidates were elected. It is not
therefore true to say that Leo XIII’s policy had broken down. In fact,
during the sessions from 1893 to 1898 the moderate republicans responded
to the advances of the Rally by advocating the ending of religious struggles.
A long time, however, was necessary before that became possible, and in
the years that concern us the least incident revived quarrels between
clericals and anti-clericals as violent as the pretexts for them were slight.
The elections of 1893 also sent to the Chamber for the first time forty to
fifty ‘socialist’ deputies. Where did they come from? There is no more
complicated history than that of the French socialist movement. Before
1870 France had produced a fairly large number of thinkers and authors
of socialist systems, of whom the latest, Proudhon, undoubtedly had the
greatest influence. But the repression of the Commune entailed the com-
plete eclipse of the movement. The few unions which survived, or which
were formed, occupied themselves with the problems of their trades alone.
When, in 1877, the republicans came to power, socialist propaganda
had a chance to be heard once more. New ideas were put out, no longer
in the French tradition but inspired by Karl Marx. The principal architect
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of this change was Jules Guesde. In 1879 he founded a ‘Workers’ Party’
C Parti Ouvrier Frangais), which, following the example of the German
Social Democrats, was Marxist and composed both of political groups and
of trade unions, these last being subordinated to the party. But it re-
mained small in numbers and in 1882 it split: Jules Guesde, thought to be
too doctrinaire, was voted down by those known as ‘possibilists’, who
were mostly workers, more anxious than the ‘intellectuals’ to obtain
immediate results, and who, under the leadership of Paul Brousse formed
the Federation des Travailleurs Socialistes de France. Meanwhile, in 1880,
the ‘Central Revolutionary Committee’ ( Parti Socialiste Revolutionnaire )
was formed, which took Auguste Blanqui for its prophet. Organised
somewhat after the fashion of a secret society, this committee did not
include any unions; neither did it adhere to Marxist doctrine, but held
itself ready to profit by any circumstances to launch a coup de force. Let it
be added that many Radicals freely called themselves ‘ socialists ’, wishing
only to indicate that they were particularly concerned with the condition
of the working classes.
Obviously the great economic crisis could not but cause repercussions
and distress among the working masses. But the little socialist factions,
which passed most of their time in quarrelling among themselves, were not
immediately able to profit by it. On the contrary, in 1886 efforts were
made to constitute a Centrale Syndicate which should at the same time
adhere to revolutionary principles and be independent of all political
organisations: this conception, which was to be characteristic of the
French working-class movement, was originally due to the wish to protect
union action from the quarrels of the political factions, which were
paralysing it. Thereafter the movement towards an independent syndi-
calism (trade union movement) was supported and reinforced both by
those who were opposed on principle to all political action — the an-
archists — and by the militants of the factions, who were at a disadvantage
in political warfare.
It was the Boulangist movement that profited most from the workers’
discontent, detaching a large part of them from the Radicals for whom
they had previously voted. Faced with Boulangism, the various socialist
groups did anything but take up a common position: the Possibilists
fought it with all their energy, the Blanquists were to a large extent in
favour of it. The episode provoked new schisms in both parties, to such an
extent that the Guesdists, who had known better than to become deeply
involved, and thus preserved their unity, became the most influential
group. In consequence, while developing a more and more lively interest
in electoral action, and while seeking a practical programme for imme-
diate fulfilment, they came, during several years, to dominate the unions.
Inside the unions a change was taking place under pressure not only
from the anarchists, but from many Possibilists also. By that time the
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militant workers, even the most determined of them, had for all practical
purposes abandoned the idea of an armed insurrection. Since the parlia-
mentary and electoral activity of the Guesdists was also repudiated, and
‘gradualism’ in the fashion of the British trade unions was disliked,
some new way had to be found. It was thus that the idea of the General
Strike materialised, the idea, that is, of a revolution to be achieved solely
by economic weapons and by corporate action. And so, while the final
objective remained revolutionary, the unions applied themselves, under
the leadership of Fernand Pelloutier, to the practical tasks which had
often, in the past, been disdained. The vital instrument of this work in
France at that time was not the big federation of a trade or an industry but
the Bourse de Travail, which united all the unions in a town, of the widest
variety of trades, and which provided a labour exchange, unemployment
benefits, general and technical education and economic studies.
But already the unions and the various socialist groups joined each year
in the great May Day demonstrations in favour of the eight-hour day,
which exhibited the power that a united working-class action could have.
And from the other side a certain number of Radical deputies, who were
no longer satisfied with the traditional attitudes of their party, were trying
to devise a socialism free of doctrinaire sterilities and factious quarrels,
which should be the creed of the many who called themselves socialists
without going so far as to be ‘Guesdists’ or partisans of any of the
groups already in existence. Millerand and an ex-deputy, the republican
sans epithete (short-and-sweet republican), Jaures, were the inspirers of
this regrouping, which helped the old socialist factions just as much by
creating a sympathetic atmosphere around them, and which on the other
hand drew a fair number of ex-Boulangists to itself.
This, then, was the background of the socialist successes in the elections
of 1893. The question must be asked — though it cannot, of course, be
answered — whether these successes were not made easier by an incident
which thoroughly shook up the political personnel of the period, the
Panama Affair. Shortly after the failure of the French company which
had undertaken the cutting of the isthmus of Panama certain important
political personages, and a large number of less well-known deputies,
were accused of having accepted money for favouring this company, and
above all for authorising the issue of shares in a lottery (the failure of this
issue, by the way, gave the signal for the final collapse of the enterprise).
There was no decisive proof against most of the individuals accused. But
the affair was exploited to the utmost to discredit the republicans, above
all by the ex-Boulangists and the conservatives; for their part, the
socialists could not miss this opportunity to denounce capitalist corrup-
tion. The idea took hold on the public that all politicians, or almost all,
were ‘ pourris' (rotten to the core) and thought of nothing except using
their positions to enrich themselves. It is by no means certain that the
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standard of public morality was lower at that time in France than in any
other country. But it should be observed that, particularly in Paris, the
number of political daily newspapers was at that time very large (more
than ten times what it is today) ; each individual deputy had to have his
own organ to express his own particular shade of opinion (and French
political thought is extremely rich in such infinitely subtle shades) and to
affirm his own particular position. Naturally, most of these newspapers
could not live on their declared resources: their circulation was very
limited; regular publicity and advertising hardly existed. They had to
secure the backing of financial and business interests, either by making
propaganda for them or by threatening them with unpleasant revelations ;
naturally the most adventurous enterprises were those most often laid
under contribution, and that of Panama more than any other. Many
politicians thus made alliances with shady businessmen not in order to
obtain the wherewithal to indulge their private vices, but in order to
supply the financial requirements they incurred politically, and especially
to cover their papers’ deficits. It is plain that the Panama Affair did much
to change the way in which the press was exploited; and the dramatis
personae of political life were to some extent replaced. But the balance of
parties in parliament was scarcely affected, except for the socialist rise.
The royalist right being reduced to impotence and doomed to decompo-
sition, and the republicans de gouvernement (constitutional republicans)
being firmly in power, it might seem that France was about to enter an
‘era of goodwill’ in which political struggles would lose much of their
importance. But the truth is that in France such situations come about
only with great difficulty. The years 1893 and 1894 were exceptionally
disturbed because of a series of anarchist outrages, which culminated in
the murder of Sadi Carnot, President of the Republic. Several explana-
tions have been put forward to explain the occurrence of these outrages
at exactly this moment — there being hardly any before or afterwards — but
none of them is completely satisfactory. The outrages, though they pro-
voked a great outcry at the time, had in the end no very important
consequences. Nevertheless, various governments passed repressive
measures against them which provoked much lively opposition from the
socialists and the extreme Radicals: they called them ‘les lois scelerates’
(miscreant laws).
Much more important was the political regrouping that was beginning.
While the Opportunists were gradually coming to benefit from the support
of a section of the old right, the Radicals were trying to discover a new
doctrine and a new programme. Constitutional revision having been
dropped, the Radicals pressed on with their anti-clerical campaign and
rejected all the Catholic Rally’s gestures with contempt. But this was
hardly enough. Their real problem was to decide on their attitude to the
socialists, whose ideas they could not accept, as being too incompatible
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with their own individualist philosophy, but whom they could no longer
restrict themselves to attacking, as this would tend to 4 throw them back on
the right’. So they tried, without much success, to evolve a new social
doctrine which should reconcile liberalism and state intervention: the
‘solidarism’ of Leon Bourgeois. They had much better success in con-
cluding a de facto alliance with the socialists. These were, moreover,
making a rapprochement easy; unprotesting, they allowed one of their
leaders, Millerand, to describe, in the ‘discours de Saint-Mande’ of May
1896, a much-moderated socialism which employed parliamentary, non-
violent, methods, which no longer threatened small properties, and which
cast no doubts on patriotism. And previously the socialist deputies had
voted for an all-Radical ministry, led by Leon Bourgeois, which made
great efforts to introduce what had become the essential point in the
Radical programme : income tax.
The French fiscal system, very little changed since the Revolution, had
for a long time been denounced as unjust and anti-democratic. The direct
taxes were based on arbitrary assessments — like the tax on movables — or
on thoroughly out-of-date evaluations — like the land-tax. The greater part
of public income came from indirect taxes on items of current consump-
tion. These weighed more heavily on the poor than on the rich, though it
is true that one of the principal taxes of this kind was that on alcohol,
against which the arguments of social justice were not entirely convincing.
For a long time financial reforms had been proposed on several sides.
But Leon Bourgeois’ ministry was the first to stake its existence on a
scheme of general taxation, to be levied on the entire income, carefully
ascertained, of each taxpayer. The system was irreproachable in theory.
But it came to grief because of great practical and psychological difficulties.
France is characterised by her multitude of small concerns — in trade, the
crafts and agriculture — which operate without a careful accountancy, and
whose real financial position is very difficult to discover. Besides, the
French cannot tolerate the idea that their neighbours, or the state, should
know how their affairs stand. Only someone who has lived in the French
countryside can fully appreciate this intense mistrustfulness. The universal
income tax, if it was not to be farcical, would have had to put an end to
the traditional secretiveness; already ‘this financial inquisition’ had been
attacked. The Senate, representing ruraldom, forced the Bourgeois
ministry to climb down by systematic obstruction. Income tax, after
long and violent discussions, was in the end adopted, but only on the
eve of the 1914 war; and agricultural incomes have not been properly
brought under control to this day.
After the fall of the Bourgeois ministry the long-lived moderate ministry
of Meline came to power under the banner of political ‘appeasement’.
This was, it may be said, the calm before the storm, for it was under this
ministry that the Dreyfus affair exploded, the Affair which by completely
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overturning both the political and the moral situations unmistakably put
an end to a period.
The Dreyfus affair can first of all be regarded as one of the best detective
mysteries in history, one of the most complicated and most baffling. It
has never been entirely cleared up, in spite of the many volumes which
have been devoted to it; many hypotheses have been put forward, of which
none is entirely convincing. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found
guilty of espionage, as he was thought to be the author of a bordereau
(memorandum) announcing the dispatch of certain confidential pieces of
information, which, it was said, had been found in the German embassy
(but even this detail has been challenged). The author of the bordereau
was really another officer, of foreign extraction, Commandant Esterhazy.
But during years of discussion and intrigue, a retrial was steadily refused.
This resistance to the recognition of the truth was to a very large extent
due to the machinations of Commandant Henry of the Intelligence Bureau
who, as part of his job, was involved in the affair from the start. Henry
did not scruple to forge documents in order to prove Dreyfus’ guilt and to
compromise the man who discovered that of Esterhazy, Colonel Picquart.
If Henry’s motives were known, there would be no more mystery : un-
fortunately, when his forgeries were detected he committed suicide (or
was deliberately silenced) and took his secrets to his grave. But what
really mattered was the upsetting of political ideas and positions of which
the affair was the occasion or the pretext.
The following period, up to 1914, was to be characterised, first, by the
triumph of the Radicals, who had been all at sea since 1889, but were
from this time almost continuously in power, often with the help of the
rapidly rising socialists; second, by a vigorous resurgence of the anti-
clerical campaign, which had appeared to be on its way out after 1892;
and third, by the fact that the most ardently patriotic or nationalistic
feelings, which previously were to be met with in all shades of opinion,
but above all on the left and conspicuously among the Radicals, appeared
from this time as the prerogative of the right.
These very important phenomena have not lacked commentators;
notably, the essayist Ch. Peguy has asked ‘comment la mystique s’etait
degradee en politique’. But we do not yet have the indispensable scientific
studies of this subject, and all that one can write on it today is therefore
largely conjectural. In particular, it is not clear that the future destiny of
the parties was directly linked to their attitude in the Dreyfus affair. If
the affair was the question of the day in Paris, it was often but poorly
understood in the greater part of the country. The first Dreyfusards, and
the most active, were isolated adherents of the most diverse tendencies;
their principal supports were a journal of the right, Figaro, and a journal
of the left, UAurore. Among the Radicals, their ex-leader Clemenceau
was one of the champions of a review of the Dreyfus case, while their
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current chief, Cavaignac, fought revision with all his might. The Oppor-
tunists, who were to be shattered politically by the affair, supplied
‘revisionists’ of mark — Scheurer-Kestner, Joseph Reinach, Waldeck-
Rousseau, and the rising hopes of the party, Poincare and Barthou — but
on the other hand the Prime Minister, Meline, tried to prevent the investi-
gation of an affair which was extremely embarrassing for his government.
Many Catholics, on the other hand, showed themselves violently and
noisily anti-Dreyfusard, particularly the newspaper La Croix. And per-
haps the relentlessness of a good number of them can be explained as
expressing their resentment at the policy of the Rally that had been
imposed on them against their wish; in any case Leo XIII, personally
convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, was never able to moderate their cam-
paign. Military circles were all anti-Dreyfusard, so much so that the
Dreyfusard campaign, on its side, often took on an anti-militarist
character. But here again all generalisation is imprudent. In the following
period many of the most active Dreyfusards were to show themselves to be
intransigent patriots and energetic defenders of the army: such men as the
Opportunist Joseph Reinach, the ex-socialist Charles Peguy and, the most
celebrated of them all, the Radical Georges Clemenceau.
It is certainly true that the violence of anti-Dreyfusard passions can to a
great extent be explained by the anti-semitic tendency which appeared in
France — and even more strongly in other European countries — at this
time. But this tendency itself appeared with a fundamental ambiguity.
It had been developing for a number of years, notably in two very different
sectors of opinion. For the average Catholic aversion to the Jews went a
very long way back, and thus may be said to have become part of the
religion. For the extreme, socialist, left, the Jew was a useful personifica-
tion of that international high finance to which were charged all the ills
of the age. Lastly, there existed from 1892 onwards a specifically anti-
semitic movement, inspired by Ldouard Drumont and feared by many
politicians for its noisy campaigns. The first attempts to secure a revision
of the Dreyfus trial were denounced as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’, and at first
many socialists accepted this explanation. Jaures, on the other hand, was
one of the most ardent Dreyfusards, and his actions then were one of the
reasons for the battle in which, from this time until 1905, the two great
socialist factions, the ‘ Jaunbsists ’ and the ‘ Guesdists ’, opposed each other.
But the history of the political regroupings that were effected in the
course of the Dreyfus affair can scarcely be separated from that of the
period which followed it. We must therefore finish our account here,
leaving the years 1898 to 1902 a sort of historian’s ‘no man’s land’, a
huge field of investigation for new researchers, now that the savage
passions of those dramatic years have subsided.
It is unnecessary to include in this chapter any account of the intellectual
life, literary and artistic, of the time, which has been dealt with elsewhere.
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This does not involve the omission here of any essential element. Not
that one could not supply, for this period as for others, a catalogue,
more or less detailed as one wished, of artists and of their works. But
what strikes the historian is the profound gulf which during this period
divided intellectual life from the life of the rest of the nation. When Victor
Hugo died in 1885 an entire nation went to his funeral ; his works could be
found in many humble homes, where they were known by heart. This
popularity — comparable or even superior to that of Lamartine in 1848 —
belonged to a vanished age. The writers of the Third Republic had no such
huge audience and no such influence on their times ; often indeed they dis-
dained or shunned it. Undoubtedly fimile Zola tried to make a huge
picture of the society of his day, of which he shared and tried to express
certain ideas and certain aspirations. But a Stephane Mallarme, or the
Maurice Barres of the Culte du Moi, only wished to speak to the subtlest
intellects. Anatole France, although more accessible, was too fond of the
well-turned phrase, and too sceptical, to move his public deeply. In the
plastic arts it was the age of the official academicians’ triumph, against which
the Impressionist painters, for example, were not able to make much head-
way. In no field has the ‘ style 1 900 ’ left a great memory behind it. Only in
music did the French school, after the death of Wagner, acquire a sort of pri-
macy, with Bizet, Chabrier, Cesar Franck, and then with Faure and Debussy ;
but in France music was merely the idol of a little group of the faithful.
We have indeed seen how the republican regime was linked, in its
origins, to a philosophy which placed science in the first place. But this
official philosophy was not taken up by any great thinker. True, Taine
and Renan had exalted science; but their liberal-conservative beliefs
left them isolated in the age of triumphant democracy. And neither the
profound Lachelier nor even the dazzling Bergson managed to shake the
rather naive confidence of their contemporaries in a science of which
they so simplified the image that their belief has been called ‘scientism’.
Truth to tell, more ignoble manifestations of intellectual life domi-
nated conversation, and still more the columns of newspapers. The last
play performed ‘sur les Boulevards’ was always ‘un evenement bien
parisien’. Paris always offered the same seductions to the foreigners that
she attracted. But it must be underlined that the brilliant life of the
capital was now superficial, that he who judged France by his stay in
Paris — many do it today — made a mistake. From 1789 to 1870 Paris
really did dominate France, imposing on the country without resistance
her tastes and passions and a succession of political regimes. But after the
triumph of universal suffrage Paris constituted no more than a fraction of
the nation ; and after the commune, Paris was in opposition. The capital
upheld Boulanger, then anti-Dreyfusard nationalism, while the great
majority of Frenchmen showed themselves to be definitely hostile to these
movements. The Third Republic was, par excellence, the provinces’ regime.
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CHAPTER XII
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, TURKEY AND
THE BALKANS
A fter the final triumph of Italian and German nationalism in 1870
ZA the Danubian lands and the Balkan Peninsula remained the one
1 A considerable area of unsatisfied nationalist aspirations in Europe.
These aspirations provided the most considerable threat to the multi-
national empires of Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Yet in both cases the
dynasty, in spite of recent challenges, was still sustained by a tradition of
inevitability; both had existed for so long, and in spite of the declining
glamour of the imperial or any other embracing role each could still ask
with some plausibility what was to be put in its place. The question in the
international field found a ready answer from the new Germany, which
was soon to tell Russia that Austria-Hungary was a European necessity,
and from Great Britain, which was still making the same extravagant
claim for Turkey; and if Russian views were divided they were not pressed
to the limit. At home, many could still not conceive of life without
emperor or sultan. Echoing Palacky, Prince Charles Schwarzenberg asked
the Young Czech extremists in 1891, ‘what will you do with your country,
which is too small to stand alone?’ and in 1897 the Young Turk exile
Murat Bey said that the ruling dynasty must remain at the head of the
empire, for without it Turkish power had no existence. Nevertheless, the
chance of survival for both Habsburg and Ottoman came to depend less
and less on past glory or present convenience and more and more on two
conditions: the international stalemate after 1878 and the hostilities which
divided the national minorities and which postponed and confused their
challenge to the state. After humiliating external defeats at the beginning
of this period, both were able to restore and in some measure strengthen
the central authority, and to survive into the twentieth century. But the
respite was temporary. Although at the turn of the century the Habsburg
monarchy seemed to have made a more distinguished contribution than
the Ottoman to the problem of survival, in fact both dynasties were near
their end.
The more favourable picture of Austria-Hungary was due in part to the
dramatic qualities of ‘Abd al-Hamld’s sins and the excesses of his bizarre
regime; partly to the prestige of the Austro-German Alliance, the aura of
liberal respectability which accompanied the Magyars into the twentieth
century, the vast superiority of the Austro-Hungarian to the Ottoman
bureaucracy, and the obscurity and complexity (to the eyes of foreign
observers) of the nationalist struggle inside the monarchy. The two
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empires and the Ottoman succession states in the Balkans were never-
theless (if only because of geographical proximity) closely interlocked, and
there was in their relations something of the confusion of working
bargains between antipathetic partners which also distinguished the
purely internal affairs of each empire. At many points it was to the interest
of Constantinople and Vienna to look to each other for support against
the rising tide of Slav nationalism in the Balkans, and they and the small
Balkan states had all learned to look with some suspicion on Russian
designs, although the Russian government could claim a qualified interest
in the political survival of all of them.
In the early 1870’s the Ottoman government still retained, despite the
misgivings of the better informed, numerous friends and a fair reputation
in western Europe. The reform programme promised or foreshadowed in
the Hatti-Humayoun of 1 856 had not been entirely a failure. There seemed
to be sufficient vitality and determination in the Turkish army and admini-
stration, and perhaps a sufficient measure of loyalty or fatalism among the
masses of the population, to enable the Sublime Porte (the Turkish central
government) to struggle along, to turn the more difficult comers, even to
score some successes. The international situation was not unfavourable;
none of the great powers wanted a Near Eastern crisis. The effect on
Europe of a prolonged or general Christian revolt was incalculable; but
for the time being the subject populations were quiescent.
For nearly a hundred years, since the days of Selim III (1789-1807), the
initiative in reform had come from the sultanate; and the accession of
‘Abd al-Aziz (1861-76) had aroused hopes of a fresh impetus. The western-
ised and well-meaning Tanzimatists in Constantinople, and in particular
the two Grand Vezirs, Mehmed Kecheji-zade Fu’ad Pasha and Mehmed
Emin ‘Ali Pasha, made a fairly good impression. When the British,
French, Austrian and Russian governments in 1867 undertook an exami-
nation of the progress of the reforms, their conclusions, while recognising
inefficiency and misrule, had not been wholly pessimistic. The Turkish
government (which had itself presented a report) could claim credit for a
scrupulous regard for the traditional rights, civil and religious, of the
Christian millets; it could argue that, if Article 9 of the Hatt, which threw
open the civil and political institutions of the empire to all citizens, had
been generally ignored, the fault was not entirely that of the Turkish
authorities, for the Christian ra'iyeh had clearly no liking for military
service and were usually too servile to assert themselves in office. Nor
were they very willing to accept reforms in their own millets. The new
vilayet system, which was closely modelled on French administrative
legislation, was considered to have been a marked success in the Danubian
province under Midhat Pasha from 1864 to 1867 and was extended
(1867-8) to other provinces except ‘Iraq and the Yaman. A Council of
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State with Midhat as President was appointed at the beginning of 1868;
it included both Christian and Muslim members, and was charged with
the elaboration of further reforms and the preparation of the budget,
among other duties. While the French saw in these developments a vindi-
cation of their centralising programme, ‘All Pasha could commend them
as a popular check on administrative absolutism. But the advance was
small; the facade of progressive intent proved increasingly hard to main-
tain. ‘Ali and Fu‘ad never had more than a precarious hold on office, and
the sultan, who was said to have offered the office of Grand Vezir to
an elderly dancing dervish in 1863, finally became the chief saboteur of
his ministers’ programme.
Reform to the western powers meant primarily the strengthening of the
Turkish armed forces, the achievement of national solvency, and admini-
strative changes which would reconcile the sultan’s provincial subjects to
the government. The three problems were closely related, for a strong and
loyal army was important for policing as well as for defence, and cost
money; while the threat of bankruptcy would be bound to aggravate the
most potent cause of provincial unrest, the exactions of the tax-gatherer.
The French looked for a Turkish state organised to respond to the direc-
tion of an enlightened, efficient, and of course solvent, central government,
which by a more and more sincere application of the principles of admini-
strative uniformity and of civil and political equality would achieve a
fusion of the races of the empire. Reformers of the Reshid-Fu‘ad-‘Ali
school may have been sincerely prepared to accept this kind of Turkish
state, although there is nothing in their very superficial and limited con-
cessions to the Christians to suggest that they had any real conception of
the tremendous revolution in outlook and policy which such a welding of
Christian and Muslim would imply. What is quite clear, as the French
rightly assumed, is that the near miracle of fusion could have been
achieved only by sustained pressure from the centre, where the abilities of
Fu‘ad and ‘All and the handful of competent and progressive officials
whom they had fostered were at the mercy of the sultan’s fitful moods.
Yet the forms of Ottoman reaction involved in the yearnings of ‘Abd
al-Aziz and his entourage for the old autocratic grandeur did not find any
genuine response in the conservatism of the devout and orthodox
Muslims, and they did something to foster the stirrings of Turkish
nationalism among the Turkish intelligentsia. The latter first became
marked in the 1860’s among some Turkish writers, who were becoming
aware of western, and particularly French, literature, and were beginning
to use the phraseology of western nationalist liberalism. Talk about the
fatherland and parliamentary government soon led to more specific criti-
cisms of the despotism of the sultanate and to the assertion of the need for
western institutions as the basis of a strong state. Like most revolutionary
liberals they were prepared to tolerate the minorities but not to accept
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them as partners. This was the Young Turk (or New Ottoman) movement
in its first phase. The movement appears to have had little political
importance at this time. The leading figures found it expedient to live
abroad, although their writings were known to a restricted circle of
readers at home. Rifat Bey edited the first Young Turk journal, Hurriet
(Liberty), which was founded in London in 1864. Namik Kemal’s
patriotic drama, Vdtan, yahud Silistere (Fatherland or Silistria) was first
produced in 1873. These and other writers, including Ziya Bey, Shinasi
Efendi, Nuri Bey, and ‘All Su‘avi, were able by their writings to familiarise
a limited but growing circle with the picture of a constitutional nationalist
state. They were to play some part in the revolutions of 1 876.
Neither they nor the reforming vezirs nor ‘Abd al-Hamid after 1877
seemed able to understand the need for a modernised economy to support
and sustain the reforms. The western powers were shocked at the prospect
of the bankruptcy of the state, but they too thought of its salvation too
exclusively in terms of financial reform. Yet there was little doubt that the
root cause of Turkey’s peculiar difficulties went back to the attempts of
Mahmud II to save the state at heavy cost by the creation of professional
fighting forces on the European model without a corresponding revolution
in economic life. In Egypt in similar circumstances Mehmed ‘All had
shown greater awareness of the need for economic advance, although with
no greater ultimate success. The state of the Turkish armed forces was in
many ways impressive by the early 1870’s and certainly formed the most
solid achievement of the reform period. The navy, administered by the
retired English Rear-Admiral, Hobart Pasha, with good sailors and a total
of twenty-one armour-clad vessels, was counted the third strongest in
Europe, in spite of its lack of sea training and the doubtful quality of the
officers. Early in 1877 Colonel James Baker, while recognising that ‘a
paper army in Turkey is even more unreal in point of numbers than it is in
other countries ’, put the total army strength at 416,530 men, with a further
250,000 from the levee en masse which might be used to replace casualties.
He thought the army ‘superlatively good as regards the men’ and was im-
pressed by the quality of much of the equipment. The heavy expenditure
on the army had not yet succeeded in solving the problem of an adequate
and efficient force of officers, but the latest phase of the army reforms,
which owed much to Husain Awn! Pasha after 1869, showed that the
problem of education was at least understood. Students were drawn from
eight military preparatory schools at the age of 16 to a number of good
military schools; the Imperial Military College, founded by Mahmud II,
produced after a five-year course officers who went straight into the army
with the rank of captain, while the College of Artillery and Engineering
produced sub-lieutenants after a four-year course. Elementary schools to
supply the preparatory schools were established in 1875. There was a
Military College of Medicine at Constantinople.
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But this ambitious effort, which had brought notable rewards in the
Crimea, and which was to justify itself again at Plevna, would lose much
of its political value if Turkey failed to retain the military support of the
western powers. And this would be a likely result of the collapse of her
antiquated economy under the armament burden, accelerated by the lush
wastefulness of the palace. The military effort was in any case incomplete.
There seemed so far little to show for the work and expense of the military
colleges. Irregular pay and poor prospects of promotion (with the higher
grades often filled by favouritism without regard to military ability) no
doubt depressed and discouraged the trained young officer; he would be
further depressed by the frequent promotion from the ranks of officers
who had received very little training of any sort. There is nothing sur-
prising in the process whereby the products of the military schools came
in time to reinforce the Young Turk advocates of political reform. Con-
scription, which fell heavily on certain areas, was also a contributory
factor in the impoverishment of the state. Baker estimated that about
one in 450 of the Muslim population was called to the army annually, and
as the recruiting for each corps was confined to the military districts, some
with a large Christian majority, the drain on the Muslim population in
many cases was severe. Yet there could be no relaxation ; without Christian
recruits the source of supply, considering the extent of the empire, was
extremely small for an army which might have at any time to fight
a first-rate European power in a lengthy campaign.
There was thus an unsolved problem of survival for Turkey and the
sultan’s personal interventions made him merely the most obvious and
grotesque symptom of the deeper maladies of the state. His unproductive
expenditure included battleships, but it also included marble palaces. His
personal oddities — a growing taste for fulsome speech and obsequious
ceremonial, for bonfires and red ink — might have been accepted as no
more than the whims of an unbalanced man if somehow a reasonable
conduct of public business had been maintained. But as it happened his
interferences with the central government became so open and absurd
after ‘All’s death in 1871 that the reformers were bound to make him the
scapegoat for the disasters of 1875-6. On the one hand there was the vast
expenditure on new palace building, the harem, personal favourites, and
personal indulgence on a scale which seriously depleted the state revenue ;
on the other, an obvious intention to appoint servants who would satisfy
his demands, financial and otherwise. The office of Grand Vezir changed
hands six times between September 1 87 1 and February 1 874. During this
period the Porte continued to announce additions to the reform pro-
gramme, although they seemed a more and more unconvincing facade to
the depressing reality of government policy. By 1874 the ministers had
long since abandoned any hope of making the palace understand the
gravity of the financial crisis. In August 1875 the palace had exhausted
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its account at the Imperial Ottoman Bank, which refused further supplies :
but when the British ambassador asked what the sultan’s reaction would
be the Foreign Minister replied that he doubted whether the sultan would
ever hear the news.
Turkey was now on the verge of national bankruptcy. In the absence of
sufficient economic progress to augment the national revenue the Porte
had been led to meet increased expenditure by foreign loans, an easy but
fatal expedient in the absence of either a regular surplus or even an effi-
cient system of tax collection. Tax farming was declared abolished in the
reform programmes in 1839 and 1856, and again in 1875 ; on each occasion
it had to be restored, owing to the immediate need for revenue which the
attempted modernisation of the financial structure seemed unable to
supply. The first loan, of £3,000,000, was issued in 1854 to meet the
expenses of the Crimean War, with an issue price of 80, and interest at
6 per cent ; it was contracted by Messrs Dent, Palmer, of London on the
security of the Egyptian tribute. By 1875 there had been thirteen further
loans, with a nominal capital of £184,981,783; the last, for £40,000,000 in
1874, had interest of 5 per cent and an issue price of only 43$, and it
followed the disastrous failure of the attempt to raise £28,000,000 at 58^
in 1873. The creditors were mainly British and French. In the process
more and more sources of revenue were assigned as security: the re-
mainder of the Egyptian tribute, Syrian customs duties, customs duties
and octrois of Constantinople, tobacco, salt, stamp, and licence duties,
the sheep tax of Roumelia and the Archipelagos and the produce of the
mines of Tokat, and ‘the general revenues, present and future, of Turkey’.
National bankruptcy, in the form of either a repudiation of part or the
whole of the debt or a partial, temporary, or permanent suspension of
interest payments, might mean the death of the Sick Man through the
paralysis of the central government and of the use of its armed forces
against domestic or foreign foes; and it would mean the collapse of
Turkey’s carefully fostered reputation for progress in the west. It would be
a dismal commentary on the French faith in enlightened centralisation. It
is not surprising that the Russian ambassador was believed to have inspired
the partial suspension of interest payments announced in October 1875.
Meanwhile the provincial administration had survived a number of
crises under ‘Abd al-Aziz; in the end it was in Bosnia alone that the com-
bination of circumstances made a continued insurrection possible. It is
unlikely that even the attainment of the standard of equitable tax col-
lecting, equality before the law, maintenance of traditional ecclesiastical
privileges, and honest policing promised by the Hatt would have been
sufficient to revive the old loyalty to the sultan, to reconcile Christian and
Muslim, and to reverse the rise of nationalism in the Balkans. In spite of
the success of Mahmud II in arresting the process of disintegration in the
Muslim areas of the empire (other than Egypt) the peripheral Christian
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communities in Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and the Principalities had
attained virtual or complete independence by the middle of the century.
The survival of the Porte’s authority elsewhere came to depend far more
on the vigilant suppression of embryonic revolutionary violence, and the
damping down of innumerable local discontents before they reached a
violent or widespread form. In this essentially hand-to-mouth process,
however, the Turkish authorities always had a considerable asset in the
confusion of interests and animosities, social, religious, racial, economic
perhaps, among the mixed-up groups of the sultan’s subjects, Muslim and
Christian, so that anything like a general or concerted rising would be
difficult to sustain.
The Bulgarian areas show the Turks always able to maintain then-
authority, in spite of clashes that advertised the sources of discontent.
Although the Bulgarian peasantry formed a more or less homogeneous
mass between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains they were inter-
spersed even here with some Muslim communities, and elsewhere, south
of the Balkans and in Macedonia, with larger Turk, Greek, Serb, or
Albanian groups; the bulk of them were too poorly armed and too
accessible to the main centres of Turkish military strength to be able to
revolt successfully. They had always the age-long instinctive grudge
against the Turk as an infidel, a tax-gatherer, and a conqueror; Turkish
patronage of the Greek church, while diverting some animosity, did not
remove the ultimate barrier. But the setting-up of the Bulgarian exarchate
in 1870 effectively destroyed for over forty years the chance of a united
Christian opposition. Since 1864 the planting of colonies of Circassians,
refugees from Russian heavy-handedness, among the Bulgarians had been
an additional grievance. On the other hand the peasantry, particularly
since Midhat’s administration of the Danubian vilayet, were relatively
prosperous. The chorbadjis, the small better-off middle class and trading
community, wanted only peaceful advance, and were disposed to await
the inevitability of Ottoman gradualness, or at least the arrival of Russian
armies, meanwhile looking with favour on plans for a dualist Turco-
Bulgar solution. The genuine small extremist groups, the active revolu-
tionaries plotting their impracticable uprisings, were often suspicious of
the Russian government, which was equally suspicious of them. The
Russian government, which had left the Bulgarian insurgents to their fate
in 1829 and 1853, and was not ready for a widespread crisis in the Balkans
in the decade before 1875, saw an unpleasant similarity between the
young Bulgarian extremists and its own Nihilist revolutionaries. This did
not prevent Ignatyev, the Russian ambassador, from dabbling in some of
the Bulgarian plots, particularly through Naiden Gerov, a Bulgarian
leader who was also Russian Vice-Consul at Philippopolis. The small
risings in 1867 and 1868, for example, were partly financed from this
source. But the striking fact is that these risings, and those in 1872 and at
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Stara Zagora in September 1875, all failed ignominiously; there was no
general support for the revolutionaries, and the Turks, who were kept well
informed, took prompt and not excessive counter-measures.
The Bosnian problem was, however, a vastly more complex affair
because of the existence of a dominant Muslim minority and of a tri-
angular international competition. The Turks were unwilling to repress
their Muslim subjects unduly ; on the other hand either the Austro-
Hungarian empire or the smaller Slav states of Serbia and Montenegro
would be the residuary legatees if the insurgence of the Christian inhabi-
tants made the continuance of Turkish rule impossible. The Turkish
conquest of 1463 had been followed by the conversion to Islam of the bulk
of the landowners ; by the nineteenth century these begs, numbering with
their semi-feudal retainers probably a good third of the total population,
were among the most fiercely conservative, politically loyal, and effectively
autonomous of the sultan’s vassals, and repressive in the extreme towards
the unarmed, much-exploited Christian peasantry. A long struggle, initi-
ated by Mahmud II, had led to Omer Pasha’s success between 1850 and
1852 in destroying the virtually independent feudal powers of the begs; in
theory Bosnia now came under the control of Ottoman officials, respon-
sible to the central government, and a suitable field for Tanzimatist
reformers. In practice, grievances remained. Although the reforms had
included improvements in the legal status of the ra'iyeh the Ottoman
authorities could never risk the complete alienation of the begs, and
acquiesced more or less willingly in their retention of the realities of
Muslim predominance. In the new councils or medjliss in European
Turkey there was usually a Christian representative and Christian testi-
mony was on an equal footing with Muslim; in practice there were
invariably Muslim majorities, and in Bosnia they seem to have been
remarkably capricious in their bigotry. In the field of taxation it is
probably correct to say that the new system, which brought in the Otto-
man tax-farmer with heavy-handed police support while preserving the
landlord’s right to one-third of the peasant’s crops, had less studied
brutality but more systematic extortion than the old ; and while the begs
were feeling the pinch and increasing their demands, the imperial finances
were in too parlous a state to allow any remission of state taxation, let
alone an abolition of tax-farming itself. The conditions produced periodic
and more or less serious risings, repressions, and emigrations ; finally, the
bad harvest of 1874 and continued pressure of the tax-gatherers led to a
number of more or less simultaneous clashes, of which that between
Orthodox and Muslims at Nevesinje in the Hercegovina in June 1875 is
usually regarded as the immediate cause of the great Bosnian revolt.
A collapse of Turkish rule in Bosnia was bound to shake profoundly the
uneasy equilibrium of political forces in Austria-Hungary. The stultifying
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factor in the monarchy was the internal political deadlock which, while
preventing any fundamental challenge to the imperial government, also
prevented the growth of any overriding loyalty to the state or of any great
satisfying lines of domestic or foreign policy. There is an obvious truth in
the assertion that Austria-Hungary, having been turned out of Italy and
Germany, found her main opportunity henceforth in the Near East. Yet
it is also true that her changed domestic and diplomatic circumstances
after 1866 severely limited the extent to which she could exploit even this
opportunity.
The working alliance between Francis Joseph and the Magyars, fore-
shadowed in the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 $nd established
in 1871, dominated both the foreign and the domestic affairs of Austria-
Hungary to the end, and did much to bring it to its end : it was an alliance
of convenience, and not of regard, between the only two genuinely con-
servative forces in the empire. The emperor, whose meticulous, reticent,
bureaucratic handling of the business of state expressed at once his
authoritarian outlook, his will to survive, and his lack of creative political
imagination, was by the 1870’s an experienced and somewhat disillusioned
opportunist who could see the dangers of Magyar inflexibility. He could
also see, however, frustration in an exclusive reliance on the German
liberals. Without any very clear idea as to where he was going he had
embarked on a long series of constitutional innovations in 1866 whose
starting point was the desire to avenge Sadowa, but whose ultimate justifi-
cation was the failure of the supranational system which the defeats
of 1866 and 1859 were thought to have underlined. The original purpose
had seemed clear in such moves as the programme of army reform and the
appointment of the Saxon Prime Minister, Count Beust, as Foreign
Minister; but revenge could not be carried out immediately, and Bis-
marck speedily frustrated the more promising of Austrian (and French)
counter-moves among the south German states. Imperceptibly the anti-
Prussian purpose became a policy of wait-and-see, as the consequential
adjustments to the new course became problems in themselves; and while
this transition had its vindication in the French defeat in 1870 its explana-
tion is to be found as much in the domestic situation as the foreign.
In the ‘Compromise’ or Ausgleich of 1867 the Magyars secured com-
plete internal self-government for Hungary, which was placed constitu-
tionally and practically on an equality with the larger and richer ‘other
half’, now usually called Austria, and sometimes Cis-leithania. There was
still a ‘common monarchy’ for the whole empire, with three ministers —
of War, Foreign Affairs, and Finance — to deal with its affairs. The delega-
tions (bodies consisting of sixty representatives of each half of the
monarchy) met alternately in Vienna and Budapest to debate the com-
mon affairs of the empire; Austria contributed 70 per cent and Hungary
30 per cent to meet the common expenditure; and there was a customs
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union between the two parts which could be renewed every ten years. The
Austrian Germans, who had hitherto been the agents and essential sup-
porters of the idea of the Einheitsstaat, were the most obvious sufferers
from these arrangements, for with the Ausgleich there disappeared not
only the idea of a supranational empire but also the unchallenged pre-
dominance of the German elements in their own lands. This was partly
because Francis Joseph, while willing for the time being to entrust office
to the German liberals, was more irritated by their pretensions than he
was by those of the Magyars; partly because it was inherent in the new
policy that concessions must be made to other national groups outside
Hungary. To the emperor and the imperial bureaucracy the ‘other half’
remained a group of historic political units and not the residuary legatee
of the Habsburg monarchy: although they were willing to grant extensive
local rights of self-government to the more vociferous and aggressive
nationalities they were more than ever conscious of the need to maintain
the ultimate authority of the central power. Only in one case was a
satisfactory bargain on these lines achieved. A special Austrian ministry
for Galician affairs was established in 1871 ; Polish was recognised as the
language of administration and secondary education, financial arrange-
ments were favourable, and the government thus secured the support of
the Polish vote in the imperial parliament and confirmed the position of
the Poles as the dominant element in Galicia. The Poles were henceforth
accommodating and loyal, subject only to an ultimate and overriding
loyalty to an independent Poland. There remained in Galicia a subordi-
nated, but at first rather inarticulate, Ruthenian peasantry to brood on
the alternative possibilities of becoming Great Russians or independent
Ukrainians, and to remind the Polish aristocracy that the imperial govern-
ment had the Ruthenian card in reserve.
No such expedient bargain could be achieved elsewhere. The Czechs
had also been asking since 1868 for a status similar to that of Hungary,
and they appeared to be in sight of it with the proposals of the Hohenwart
ministry in 1871. The final form of the Czech demands, formulated after
the Bohemian Diet in September 1871 had received the emperor’s
rescript promising to recognise the rights of the Bohemian kingdom and
to confirm this recognition by a coronation oath, were set out in eighteen
‘fundamental articles’ negotiated by the ministry with the Czech leaders.
They did not go quite so far as to propose the setting up of a triune
Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian kingdom; they recognised the dual system
and proposed that the Austrian representatives in the delegations should
be directly elected by the Bohemian and other provincial Diets. They
wished, nevertheless, that the Bohmeian Diet should take over almost all
the functions of the Austrian Reichsrat, which would become a mere
congress of delegates in a federal Austrian state. The Austrian Germans
were thus faced with the loss of their influence and importance in the
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official, business, and perhaps intellectual life of both the empire and
Cis-leithania and also with the loss of their political control in Moravia
and Silesia. The Magyars foresaw both the future interference of the
aggrandised Czechs with the Slav minorities of Hungary and a possible
weakening of Magyar influence through the alliance of the discontented
Austrian Germans with the new German empire. No doubt the Czechs
could have secured useful and indeed extensive concessions if they had
asked for less; but, while the resolution of Francis Joseph was weakening,
the Czechs, under the leadership of Ladislaus Rieger, were kept from any
compromise by the intransigence of Count Henry Clam-Martinic, their ally
and the leader of the Bohemian landed aristocracy. The essential point,
nevertheless, was the open challenge of the Germans, voiced after some
hesitations by Beust, and the root and branch opposition of the Magyars,
voiced by Andrassy. Hohenwart was dismissed, Andrassy replaced Beust,
and the Habsburg-Magyar marriage of convenience was consummated.
In all essentials it was to remain, with a slightly contemptuous utilisa-
tion of German loyalty, the permanent basis of Francis Joseph’s rule.
A German liberal ministry under Prince Adolph Auersperg succeeded
that of Hohenwart ; its members were somewhat doctrinaire and politically
rather inexperienced Austro-Germans whose theories were quite com-
patible with repression of the national minorities; General Kollar, as
Military Governor of Prague, carried out this policy with severity,
muzzling the press, prosecuting Czech journalists before German juries,
severely restricting public meetings. The Czechs sulked, refused to give in,
and boycotted not only the Reichsrat but also the Diets of Brno and Prague.
On top of this there came the financial crash of 1873 with distress and
parliamentary scandals which did nothing to strengthen the regime.
In these circumstances neither the German nor the Magyar political
leaders could look with any enthusiasm on an increase in the Slav popula-
tion of the monarchy, although equally they could not welcome the
annexation of Bosnia by Serbia or Montenegro to form a great southern
Slav state. All things considered, and in spite of expansionist ambitions
in the Hofburg itself, the simplest course was to maintain Turkish
authority as long as possible. This was recognised, however, as merely the
postponement of an issue which would probably have to be faced sooner
or later, and there were not wanting arguments in favour of a forward
move by Austria-Hungary at a time of her own choosing.
The Serbian regency had indeed been sounded in 1870 on a plan to
divide Bosnia; this would have given the north-western triangle, pre-
dominantly Catholic-Croat, to Austria-Hungary, while the remainder
went to Serbia. Andrassy, influenced by Benjamin Kallay, the somewhat
Serbophile consul in Belgrade, was at first favourable: apart from satisfy-
ing the military by providing a hinterland for Austrian Dalmatia, the
plan might bring Serbia into friendship with and dependence on Austria-
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Hungary, while providing a bone of future contention between Croats
and Serbs. However, the Serbian government, which, as Andrassy rightly
suspected, hoped in due course to acquire the whole of Bosnia, turned
down the proposals, and with the pro-Russian turn in the policy of the
Serb regency which followed he began to speak with irritation of the Pan-
Serb pretensions. The incident had nevertheless focused attention on some
unattractive alternatives.
The Croats had not (at least in Magyar eyes) very much to complain of.
They had been left in 1867 to settle with Hungary as best they could and
had made their own compromise with the Magyars. They had secured
from Deak and Eotvos a separate existence within the kingdom of
Hungary for the united state of Croatia-Slavonia with a considerable
measure of self-government, although finance remained strictly, but not
inequitably, under the control of the Hungarian parliament. Their share
in the transaction of the common affairs of the monarchy was recognised
by representation in the delegations and in the Hungarian parliament, and
they could speak Croat wherever they liked. Nevertheless, there was the
usual fierce haggling over political rights and even a minor insurrection.
Some fiscal and educational concessions and the appointment of a popular
poet of peasant stock, Ivan Maiuranid, as Ban in 1 873 eased tension and
appeased moderate opinion. But the Croats still resented the Magyar rule
and the Habsburg desertion, and were beginning to find solace in the
allurements of the Yugoslav idea. In the form both of Gaj’s ‘Illyrianism’
in the 1840’s and the southern Slav cultural propaganda of Bishop
Strossmayer and his associates in the 1860’s and 1870’s this movement
contained a challenge to Habsburg-Magyar authority on the one hand and
Serbian aspirations on the other; it was for this reason that Andrassy had
grasped at the hope of a perpetuation of Serb-Croat rivalry which could at
least be expected to lessen the self-assurance of the Croats in their dis-
satisfaction with the Hungarian government.
Beyond this point it was difficult to plan with any assurance. Stross-
mayer’s ardent and generous programme, which gave particular en-
couragement to Croatian scholars but extended its patronage to cultural
societies and activities among all the southern Slavs, was accompanied by
political aspirations which looked to the reconciliation of Orthodox and
Catholic Slavs in a unified state. One party in Croatia dreamt of the
union under one crown of all the southern slavs, with Agram (Zagreb) as
the headquarters of a state of some 6,000,000 persons which would include
the triune kingdom (Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia), Bosnia, the Herce-
govina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Old Serbia; others in Croatia would
have been content more modestly with the triune kingdom alone. Serbian
aspirations were confined to the uniting of the Slav populations on the
right bank of the Save; the Croats and their Catholic propaganda were
looked on with suspicion, and in any case Pan-Serb expansionists could
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not think seriously of trying to detach the lands of the Austro-Hungarian
Slavs from the Dual Monarchy. The greater Serbia, expanded at Turkey’s
expense, would nevertheless include Old Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina,
as well as Montenegro. There was no lack of even wider visions. Among
Hungary’s Serb population in the Voivodina there were dreams of a
southern Slav federation which would include the Bulgars; some even
proposed to include Roumania and the Bukovina. Svetozar Miletic, the
leading figure among the Hungarian Serbs, had the usual weakness for
all-embracing schemes of Slav unity, combined with a tendency to quarrel
with most of his neighbours. He deplored the handing over to the control
of the Hungarian government of the areas hitherto known as the military
frontiers. The inhabitants of these areas were villagers of Croat and Serb
stock, brought up in a tradition of dynastic loyalty to the Habsburgs, who
for several centuries had formed the spearhead of Austrian attack and the
first line of defence against the Turks ; hitherto they had been governed by
the Minister of War in Vienna. Miletic was also on bad terms with the
Serbian regency and the Orthodox clergy, and found much to criticise in
Russian Pan-Slavism.
But on balance it must have appeared to Andrassy that while an occu-
pation of Bosnia might drive a wedge between the Croats and Serbia it
was likely to make the Hungarian Serbs more obstreperous than ever.
Against this had to be set the apprehension, difficult to evaluate, as to
Russian aims. Everyone knew that Russia spoke with two voices; but the
voices themselves were equivocal. If the Russian foreign office frowned
on the revolutionary radicalism of Serbian and Bulgarian youth it en-
couraged the aspirations of Prince Nicholas of Montenegro and main-
tained numerous consulates and vice-consulates in Bosnia and Macedonia,
where there was little orthodox business for them; and if Ignatyev and the
consuls professed to be seeking no more than the welfare of the Christians
under Turkish rule there were individuals among them who did little to
conceal their revolutionary zeal and animosities, which were often more
anti-Austrian than anti-Turk. In the circumstances the tendency was to
exaggerate the extent of Russian influence. It made no impression on the
Croats. Among the Serbs the Omladina, a secret society in which Miletic
had played an active part since its foundation in 1866, had somewhat
strained relations with the Serbian government and was naturally re-
garded in many official circles in Vienna and Budapest as the agent of
Russian Pan-Slavism, although it seems to have had no such function.
The case for an Austrian forward policy was one of prestige, strategy,
and commercial advantage. Some striking and not too difficult foreign
success would balance the losses of 1859 and 1866. The soldiers wanted a
part or the whole of Bosnia to provide a hinterland to Austria’s narrow
Dalmatian territory. The handing over of the military frontiers was con-
sidered to have increased the need (or strengthened the case) for this
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advance. Andrassy, in spite of his increasing caution after 1871, was sus-
ceptible to the prestige argument, both from the general European angle
and as a gesture to the emperor. He was equally or perhaps more
strongly influenced by the conviction that Austria-Hungary must assert
herself as the natural protector of the west Balkan peoples and that her
natural role was that of a powerful good neighbour in ensuring their
equitable treatment by the Turks. The commercial argument was also
based on both defensive and expansive interests. Austria-Hungary had
dominated the external trade of European Turkey before the Crimean
War and had lost much of her position to the British after it, a process
which had been helped by the opening up of railway lines from Salonika
to Mitrovica and from Constantinople to Adrianople and Philippopolis,
with branches to Dedeagach and Yamboli. North of Mitrovica and the
Balkan Mountains there were, in Turkish territory, only two lines from
the Danube to the Black Sea and a shorter one still from the Austrian
frontier to Banjaluka in northern Bosnia. The Austrian business world in
the i87o’s was awakening to the need and possibility of the opening up of
adequate trade-routes from the north, and these were to be given definite
shape during the eastern crisis of 1875-9 by the influential director of the
commercial section of the Austrian foreign office, Baron Schwegel. The
main aim was to complete the great Orient railway from Vienna to
Constantinople, linking up with the Turkish section at Nish, and with the
Salonika-Mitrovica line; occupation of Bosnia would facilitate an
exercise of Austria’s political influence that would keep Serbia in her
commercial orbit and ensure the safety of her trade-route through
Scutari. This in turn pointed to friendship with the north Albanian tribes
and control of the sanjak of Novipazar ; it suggested an economic reason
for restraining the territorial ambitions of Montenegro.
For all its immediate success, Andrassy’s tenure of the foreign ministry
(1871-9) merely perpetuated in the field of Austrian foreign policy the
deadlock which had descended on domestic affairs. He showed some
satisfaction with his own diplomatic skill when Bosnia-Hercegovina fell
into the lap of the monarchy in 1878 as a result of Russia’s exertions; in
general, however, the course of the Near Eastern crisis from 1875 to 1879
amply confirmed the view that any change in Austria’s foreign relations
had its counter-balancing disadvantages, and that, politically and stra-
tegically, the best of all possible policies would be to avoid change
altogether. What Andrassy secured at the Congress of Berlin was a balance
of power in the peninsula which sharpened all the political and strategical
issues; the Russians back on the Danube in Bessarabia, a small auto-
nomous Bulgarian state which carried Russian influence down to the
Balkan mountain chain, a Macedonia still Turkish but threatened by
Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, and even Albanian nationalism, an Austro-
Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and a sulky and dis-
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credited Serbia, cast-off by Russia and viewing distastefully the need for
accommodation with the monarchy.
The new position was viewed uneasily by many elements inside the
monarchy, and Andrassy had to face difficulties over the Bosnian occu-
pation which had nothing directly to do with the longer-term foreign
problem. The occupation was unsatisfying both to those who wanted
more of Turkish territory and to those who feared even this degree
of disturbance of the internal racial and political balance. Partisanship
was open, violent, and contradictory. Croats in Agram and Slovenes in
Laibach had demonstrated in favour of Balkan Slav aspirations; Czechs
and southern Slavs extolled the tsar and the Russian armies, and Rieger
exclaimed to the Russian Pan-Slavist, Ivan Aksakov, that Slavdom could
achieve great things for mankind, if its strength were not lamed by dis-
union. But in Budapest after the Turkish defeat in 1877 a mass meeting
called for war with Russia, and sympathy for Turkey was widespread.
While Budapest citizens presented a sword of honour to ‘Abd al-Kerim,
the conqueror of the Serbs in 1876, Czechs presented a sword of honour
to Chemyaev, the Serbs’ defeated commander. The expansionists included
the emperor himself and were strongly represented among the army
leaders; to them it seemed that Andrassy was throwing away a heaven-
sent opportunity not only to annex Bosnia-Hercegovina outright, but to
dominate, and evenly possibly annex, the western Balkans as far as
Salonika. Francis Joseph’s clear approval of the forward policy helped
Andrassy up to a point; in both Austria and Hungary the emperor’s
wishes helped to secure the ratification of the Treaty of Berlin, but only
after major political crises.
The grounds for attack had certain points in common in each country.
In Austria, led without much discretion by Edward Herbst and other
German liberal leaders and backed by the Neue Freie Presse, it did not
represent any particular concern for the feelings of the Turks. But it did
express violent alarm at the danger to the precarious Austrian-German
position of an influx of 2,000,000 Slavs into the monarchy, and was also
an outlet for gathering resentment at the party’s virtual exclusion from a
voice in foreign policy. In Hungary there was also a basic fear of the
influx of Slavs, but it came from conservative quarters and the Indepen-
dent party and was influenced by some spontaneous friendliness for the
Turks. There was also great concern at any change in the political status
quo which would reduce the relative strength of Hungary in imperial
affairs. The result was that both Francis Joseph and Andrassy felt that
they had no more use for the German liberals, whose main virtue had con-
sisted in acquiescence : deprived of the imperial influence. Prince Adolph
Auersperg resigned and the party was defeated at the general election in
June 1879. In Hungary, on the other hand, where the premier, Koloman
Tisza, leader of the Liberal party and the Magyar protagonist of dualism
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since 1875, had lost ground heavily through his support of the Bosnian
occupation, the ultimate effect of the crisis was to consolidate his position
in the emperor’s regard.
The result was to increase inside the Dual Monarchy the deadlock that
was inherent in dualism, and to perpetuate in the Balkans the deadlock
which had followed the Russian and Austrian advances in 1878. But the
immediate consequences to Austria-Hungary were favourable : in domestic
politics a period of relative tranquillity, and in the Balkans a successful
bolstering of the Turkish state which the monarchy had now no desire to
disturb.
In Count Eduard Taaffe, the Austrian premier from 1879 to 1893,
Francis Joseph had a loyal and accommodating servant who could make
the most of this temporarily favourable situation. The strengthening of
the empire abroad and the weakening of dissident elements at home
enabled him throughout the 1880’s to keep together a bloc of supporters
(‘the iron ring’) and to increase the emperor’s influence and authority.
The basis of his success was the collapse of Czech intransigence. The
boycott of the Reichsrat since 1868 had brought Rieger and his followers
no profit, and in 1878 he had been compelled to satisfy those of his
countrymen who were prepared to see what could be gained by co-
operation. Taaffe was thus able to bring the Czech deputies to the support
of his ministry. The Poles, ready, on conditions, to respond to the emperor’s
call on their loyalty, and the Catholic Centre were the other two elements
that gave him his majority over the German liberals and progressives.
The three groups were of approximately equal size and Taaffe, while
evading fundamental changes, could offer a certain range of immediate
concessions together with the hope of an ultimate settlement of the
nationalist claims. The Czechs, unsatisfied but not unhopeful, secured
various rewards, mainly linguistic and cultural ; their language was given
equality with German in the public affairs of Bohemia and Moravia, a
national Czech university was founded in Prague in 1881, some Czech
secondary schools were established, some posts made available to Czechs
in the state administration. The Poles and the conservatives also had their
rewards. In the meantime the Austrian state finances were slowly put
into good order; control of the railways by the state was resumed, and the
‘Austrian idea’, which could no longer command general political accept-
ance, was vindicated administratively by a competent and omnipresent
bureaucracy. But all the empire’s fundamental problems remained, and
Taaffe was merely the pleasantest and most adroit of the instruments
whereby Francis Joseph postponed their solution.
If the empire was to survive it must win the tolerance of the nationalities,
but the nationalities had no tolerance towards one another. The Austrian
Germans were no more ready to concede the demands of the Czechs than
the Magyars were to concede those of the Croats. Their refusal to corn-
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promise was not due to any desire to destroy the empire; on the contrary,
the pushing of irreconcilable nationalistic claims to their logical extreme
presupposed an unshakable imperial framework within which an eternal
struggle for concessions could proceed. As the limits of Taaffe’s conces-
sions came in sight in the late i88o’s, Rieger and his ‘Old Czech’ followers
rapidly lost ground before the rising Young Czech party, which in turn
was kept on its toes by the Czech Radicals and Agrarians. The Young
Czechs gained control of the Diet of Bohemia as a result of the elections of
1889. They were faced by a correspondingly uncompromising German
opposition. The Linz Programme of the German Nationalists in 1882
was an attempt to restore German supremacy in Austria; it looked to
Bismarck, who had no desire to help, and emphasised its own exclusive-
ness by a growing anti-semitism, which was one means whereby the dema-
gogic violence of one of its leaders, Schonerer, came to dominate the
movement. In Bohemia the battle was waged furiously throughout the
i88o’s. The Germans loudly denounced the dangers of Pan-Slavism and
fought any concessions to the Czechs in matters of language, education,
and administration; the Czechs were equally inflexible in fighting for
every concession that they could secure. In an attempt at a solution
Taaffe initiated discussions in January 1890 which led to a plan whereby
each nationality would be administratively supreme in its own area. This
meant in effect the administrative division of Bohemia between Germans
and Czechs; and the Old Czechs were agreeable. The Young Czechs on
the other hand were not prepared to renounce their claim to the whole.
Nor were the Germans, although a minority, prepared to accept minority
status. Taaffe had come to the end of his compromises. In 1893, after a
proposal for almost universal suffrage had shocked nearly all his followers,
he was dismissed. His view was that the enfranchising of the masses
would sweep away the narrow issues which made up the political life of
the existing party groups. The emperor was not ready for the leap: he
thought that it would land him in more problems than those from which
he escaped, and certainly threaten his own authority by forcing him to
accept representative governments. The unrepresentative groups of politi-
cians who were called on to form governments for the next few years were
agreed on nothing except their dislike of the universal franchise, and could
find no solution of the German-Czech issues.
Hungary had its own form of deadlock, but here the nationalist
problem was that of a group all too firmly in power. The Magyars, a bare
50 per cent of the population, kept the other groups firmly in check. In
Austria, Germanisation was on the defensive; in Hungary, Magyarisation
was still being pushed to the limit. In the Linz Programme the Germans
had been only too willing to propose the transfer to purely Hungarian rule
of Dalmatia, Bosnia, Galicia, and the Bukovina, a device which would
have increased the relative strength of the Germans in Austria while
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placing the Magyars in a decisive minority, and was significant mainly as
a further confession of failure to solve the empire’s basic problem. Bosnia
remained under dual control, although it was the Hungarian, Benjamin
Kallay, who was entrusted as Minister of Finance with its administration
in 1882. Koloman Tisza, Hungarian premier from 1875 to 1890, relied
mainly on the support of the gentry and led a liberal ministry of faithful
but exigent followers. The denunciation of Pan-Slavism and a thoroughly
repressive policy towards the nationalities was a convenient way of
demonstrating that while serving the emperor Tisza and his followers
remained true Magyars. The limited franchise was maintained on a
severe linguistic basis which effectively preserved the Magyar monopoly
even in non-Magyar constituencies. It also, as in Austria, kept the vote
from the working man. The literary or religious aspirations of Roumans,
Slovaks, Croats, and Serbs were resisted; weaker groups, such as the
Saxons of Transylvania, lost their local privileges. The main problem,
however, was that of the Croats, whose dream of a southern Slav state in
a triune kingdom had been strengthened by the Bosnian occupation. They
were able to put up a better resistance than the other minorities to some
of the Magyar encroachments, and after some serious clashes the
Hungarian-Croatian compromise was renewed in 1879 and again in 1889.
Meanwhile the Hungarian magnates found a policy of their own in
attacking Dualism itself ; this proved a useful politicians’ device for under-
mining Tisza, who remained loyal to the Ausgleich and the emperor.
Nevertheless, the royal title was amended to ‘imperial and royal’ in 1889,
and this led on to demands for the removal of other symbols of the con-
nection, such as the common army.
By the end of the 1890’s the collapse of constitutional government in
Austria and the unyielding nationalism of Hungary meant that Austria-
Hungary was ceasing to be a viable state : but she was still sustained by
the conviction of most of her politicians that there was nothing to take
her place.
In the crises of 1875-8 the sultanate had been faced with the possibility
of the complete loss of its European possessions through insurrection and
foreign attack. The process was arrested through a variety of causes : the
intervention of the great powers, unable either in 1876 or 1878 or 1880 to
agree on the limits of coercion; the continued rivalries between the
Christian minorities, and the continued acceptance of the Hamidian
regime by the majority of Muslims ; above all, perhaps, the tenacious, un-
sleeping defence of his authority by the sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid in the
1880’s and 1890’s. This does not, however, quite solve the mystery of the
Sick Man’s continued survival. In European Turkey as in Austria an
imperial system was making its last stand ; but ‘Abd al-Hamid, unlike the
Habsburgs, could offer neither prosperity nor good administration nor
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the comfort of great power status to satisfy the Christian and Muslim
communities in the peninsula.
One reason for the real, if limited, recovery after 1880 was that the
revolutionary movement of 1875-6 had at least meant the removal of
some of the grosser abuses inherent in the reform programme. There
would be no repetition of ‘Abd al-AzIz’s whims and extravagance. He had
been forced to abdicate on 29 May 1876, and was found dead six days
later; his successor Murad V had apparently collapsed mentally under the
strain of the crisis and was deposed on 31 August. ‘Abd al-Hamld II who
followed was by nature parsimonious ; but in any case the national bank-
ruptcy made austerity inevitable. For some years the contrast was
striking: all outward display was abandoned at court, even on formal
occasions the sultan wore only a simple military great-coat without
decorations, his servants were poorly dressed and even slovenly, and the
high officials were careful to avoid any show of prosperity and self-
importance, many of them being genuinely in straitened circumstances.
This mean show took the edge off the revolutionary discontent in the
capital itself : those who found little glory in the regime had to recognise
its limited resources, and ‘Abd al-Hamid in the early days could parade
and at the same time postpone reformist plans with some plausibility.
Indeed, he convinced many close observers of his zeal. For a time he
convinced Midhat Pasha, who interviewed him in August 1876 on the eve
of Murad’s deposition; he not only accepted the condition that he should
promulgate a new constitution and take the Young Turks Ziya Bey and
Kemal Bey as his private secretaries, but spoke yearningly of the more
advanced reforms that he proposed to introduce. He half convinced Sir
Austin Henry Layard, the British ambassador, in many cosy chats in
which he talked sadly and apparently sincerely of his hopes and difficulties.
He was morbidly afraid — as well he might be — for his own safety; this
was a legacy of the events of 1876 and the ease with which his two pre-
decessors had been deposed. After the killing of the Young Turk, ‘All
Su‘avl, who was shot on 24 May 1878 in an attempt to seize the Cheragan
Palace and restore Murad, ‘Abd al-Hamld was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown for some days, and made panic-stricken appeals to the British
and German ambassadors to protect him and arrange for his escape to
England. After this affair he scarcely ever went outside the palace and its
garden except to attend a mosque on Fridays at one of the gates. It was
possible for some time to believe that the exiling of Midhat in February
1877 and of other reformers and Young Turks might be due to these
personal fears and not to an aversion for reforms in general. Having
disposed of Midhat he summoned the promised parliament, which
endorsed the war with Russia in April and was not dissolved until July
1877; after the Congress of Berlin he agreed in October 1878 to the
British proposals for reform in Asia Minor, and the unexpected appoint-
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ment of the burly Tunisian minister, Khair al-DIn Pasha, the author of
a brochure reconciling western civilisation with Islamic law, seemed a
further guarantee of liberal intentions. The constitution remained in
being, even if parliamentary government was suspended, and he con-
tinued to protest that he ruled only through his ministers. It is not
necessary to assume that ‘Abd al-Hamid, a hard-headed, narrow man
with a practical turn of mind, an excellent revolver shot and the competent
manager of a small estate before his accession, had any difficulty in under-
standing the material advantages that would come from a stable and
contented community. His sorrowful talks to Layard about the lament-
able lack of capable men and the desire of everyone for luxury and sensual
enjoyment were interspersed with more and more shrill pleas for money,
and show a progressive sense of frustration. One clue to his policy
throughout is a fear of domestic enemies so morbid as to prevent his
entrusting real authority to anyone for long. The other is a genuine lack of
resources which was most strongly marked in the field of finance. With
this went a growing understanding of the unwillingness of the powers to
involve themselves in further crises in the Near East. By 1881 he had
taken the measure of his domestic and foreign opponents; he had assessed
remarkably well the limits of concession and defiance, and could remain,
without progress and without disaster, the master of his own house for the
next twenty years.
The first problem was to salvage as much as possible from the wreck of
1878. Although the Treaty of Berlin had provided for cessions of Turkish
territory to Austria-Hungary (Bosnia), Russia (Bessarabia), and all the
Balkan states, the new frontiers had in many cases been sketched in only
general terms on partly deficient maps, and there were opportunities for a
good deal of haggling in the boundary commissions. Where the sultan
retained his titular sovereignty, as in Bosnia and Bulgaria, there were
struggles to retain some vestiges of authority, although it was soon
evident that it was only against the Austrians that he intended to make
any real fight. It was not until 21 April 1879, after much stubbornness on
both sides, that an Austro-Turkish convention regulating the conditions
of occupation of Bosnia, Hercegovina, and the sanjak of Novipazar was
signed; there was a desperate last-minute effort on the part of the Porte to
persuade Andrassy to renounce Austrian rights of garrison in the sanjak.
The convention contained a secret clause providing for joint Austro-
Turkish resistance to an attack on the garrisons of either power in the
sanjak, but immediately after the signature the sultan pressed for its
cancellation, on the ground that it might involve him in operations against
Muslims who had been driven to revolt by Austrian cruelty and oppres-
sion. The clause had aroused the hostility of Osman Pasha ; Russia was
known to have denounced it to the Porte. Andrassy agreed to the cancel-
lation on 20 May. ‘Abd al-Hamid’s scruples were probably genuine. He
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was, nevertheless, well aware that there were three widely dispersed areas
of Muslim resistance to the Berlin settlement and that his Muslim
subjects would have to be handled carefully.
Of the three, the Bosnian rising was on a formidable scale: 90,000
rebels, mainly Muslim and Orthodox, stiffened with some regular Turkish
soldiery and Albanian volunteers, resisted the entry of the Habsburg
troops, and only the Roman Catholic population welcomed them with
any enthusiasm. The Orthodox wanted union with Serbia or Montenegro.
What the Muslims wanted was not so clear ; many of them had had their
grievances against the Turkish government in 1875. What they did not
want was Habsburg rule. A Croat general led the occupying armies, and
after several weeks of serious fighting the rising was crushed, with suffi-
cient publicity to discredit the government in Vienna and Budapest, and
sufficient brutality to discredit it in the two provinces. The sultan kept
aloof, but secured in the April convention the acknowledgement of his
sovereignty and of his rights as head of the Muslim community; as it
turned out neither of these provisions meant very much, and after the
rising the administration was thoroughly assimilated to the Austro-
Hungarian imperial system, mainly by Croat officials. There was a further
rising in 1882.
Nor could the sultan or the Porte give any help to the most obscure,
most tragic, and, because of their proximity to the capital, most vulner-
able group of Muslim insurgents, the Pomaks. The so-called Rhodope
rising went on intermittently from April to October 1878, the leader being
an adventurer of British stock. In the mountain region south of the
Maritza the insurgents had done their best to resist the Russian forces and
to shelter the columns of Muslim refugees escaping from the war areas
and from the hostility of the Bulgarians. At one time there were some
50,000 men under arms, and a ‘provisional Pomak government’ issued
manifestos and was believed to have agents in Constantinople. The back
of the rising was broken by some large-scale brutalities on the part of the
Russian troops and Bulgarian militia. There are signs that the Turkish
authorities both encouraged and feared a movement which, while de-
fending Turkish territory, was taking its affairs into its own hands.
There was a similar problem, on a bigger and more dramatic scale, in
Albania. Here there was the beginning of a genuine national movement,
in spite of Bismarck’s denial. Before 1878 Albanian risings had not been
infrequent, although they were due to taxation, conscription, and the
tenacious resistance of wild mountain people to centralising pressure
rather than to any concerted political programme. The Treaty of San
Stefano, which had proposed to include Albanian-inhabited territory in
the new frontiers of Montenegro, Serbia, and even Bulgaria, brought the
leaders of various Albanian districts to agree at Prizren early in June 1878
to set up an ‘Albanian League for the Defence of the Rights of the
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Albanian Nation’ and they presented a resolution in defence of Albanian
rights to the Congress of Berlin on 15 June 1878. The subsequent struggle
to vindicate Albanian claims had three important features.
The first was the high nuisance value of Albanian armed resistance.
The Berlin settlement had maintained peace between the great powers by
complicated and awkward compromises which might again develop into
divergences unless the new boundaries were accepted without too much
delay. Serbia occupied the Albanian districts assigned to her without
challenge, but in September 1878 Albanian tribesmen fought a consider-
able battle to prevent Montenegrin troops occupying Gusinje and Plava,
and subsequent attempts by the powers during the next two years to
redraw the frontier line all failed in face of Albanian hostility. A southern
branch of the League, with Abdul Frasheri as its leader, had 30,000
tribesmen under arms in an equally determined effort to resist the Greek
claims in Epirus. The lesson, significant for the future, was of the dispro-
portionate political importance of a determined Balkan minority when
the powers were deadlocked.
This pointed to a second significant feature : the inability of the Turkish
government to exploit this predominantly Muslim movement to its own
advantage. It is true that for a time the Porte welcomed Albanian intransi-
gence as a means of postponing inevitable concessions; it was widely
assumed abroad that the League was a put-up job on the part of the
Porte. But as the struggle developed during 1880 it became clear that
concessions were in fact inevitable — the Montenegrins would get in the
end the substance of what had been promised them — and that the League
might not only prolong the struggle dangerously but develop a national
self-consciousness which would challenge the authority of the sultan him-
self. On the other hand the sultan did not wish to lose Muslim- Albanian
support. This dilemma was increased by differences of opinion in Con-
stantinople, where the officials of the Porte appear to have been more
ready than the sultan’s secretariat at the palace to suppress the Albanian
League. After the British threat to seize Smyrna in October 1880 the sultan
at last agreed to decisive action, and Albanian resistance was crushed, not
without serious fighting, by a strong force of Turkish regulars under
Dervish Dorgut Pasha.
The third feature of the Albanian issue was that, like almost all the post-
Congress developments, it facilitated the strengthening of Austrian influ-
ence, economic and diplomatic, in the peninsula. Having consolidated
its hold on Bosnia the monarchy was determined to restrict the expansion
of Montenegro and Serbia, and to keep open the trade routes from Bosnia
and the sanjak through Macedonia to Salonika and through Shkodra
(Scutari) to the Adriatic. Britain and Austria had destroyed the big
Bulgaria of San Stefano which had included Albanian regions in the
province of Kor9a (Koritza), but after Gladstone’s leadership of the pro-
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Montenegrin naval demonstration of the powers in September 1880
Great Britain could scarcely be regarded as a friend, although Gladstone
thought seriously for a time of supporting Albanian moves for autonomy.
With Russia openly opposing Albania as being a centre of anti-Slav influ-
ence, with the Porte increasingly suspicious of Albanian demands for local
schools, officials, representative institutions, and tax relief, there was little
to counter the Austrian domination of the western Balkans for the next
twenty years. In the negotiations for the Three Emperors Alliance of
18 June 1881 Austria felt strong enough to abandon her co-operation with
England and to rely on Bismarck to keep Russia quiet; and in spite of her
complaints of Russian hostility and of the machinations of Russian agents
it soon became evident that it was Russian political and economic
influence that was on the defensive during the succeeding years.
Meanwhile the sultan had again shown, in the settlement with his
European creditors by the Decree of Mouharrem (20 December 1881), a
good sense as to how far he should yield to necessity. His most pressing
financial need after the Congress had been a temporary arrangement with
the local Constantinople banks, which had financed the war with Russia
mainly by arranging short loans on somewhat questionable security and
by negotiating a Defence Loan in which the London house of Glyn Mills,
Currie and Company had taken part. After the Congress foreign aid was
for the time being unprocurable; the attitude of the House of Commons in
December 1878 frustrated all hope of an English loan, and a French
attempt through the Comte de Tocqueville had failed by March 1879.
The sultan had no credit, at home or abroad. ‘Patience and bankruptcy
will set him quite straight ’, had been Salisbury’s unhelpful comment. ‘ It is
true he will have no credit: but an absolute sovereign is better without
credit. He only uses it to build palaces and ironclads.’ However, some-
thing had to be done. The first step was a modus vivendi with the local
banks, whose claims were met by an agreement on 10 November 1879
granting them the yield from certain sources of revenue. The Porte had,
however, reserved the right to merge the agreement in a wider one, and
appears to have abandoned during 1880 any hope of avoiding concessions.
It made comprehensive proposals for a financial settlement in its note of
3 October 1880, at the height of the Montenegrin crisis, although this
coincidence seems to have led the powers, highly suspicious of Turkish
promises, to underrate their significance. But on the Porte’s invitation the
various national groups of foreign bond-holders appointed representa-
tives who began discussions in Constantinople in September 1881. The
final result was a compromise between the desire of the bond-holders for
full indemnity, and the Turkish determination to avoid any such crippling
obligation and any guarantees of payment which would vitally impair
Turkish sovereignty. While the total indebtedness was scaled down from
£191 million to £106 million, the government ceded a wide range of
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revenues ‘absolutely and irrevocably’ until the debts were discharged.
These included the revenues allocated under the agreement of io Nov-
ember 1879, together with certain direct taxes and the yield of the
Bulgarian tribute, revenues from Cyprus and eastern Roumelia, and any
income accruing to the imperial government under the provisions of the
Treaty of Berlin from the succession states.
It is significant that this far-reaching settlement was delayed until the
completion of the outstanding negotiations over the Berlin Treaty; the
stubbornness of the sultan’s resistance to the powers had been a warning
to his creditors that Turkey was not going the way of Egypt under cover
of an international financial administration. There was no international
commission, such as had been visualised in Protocol XVIII of the Treaty
of Berlin, to control Turkish finance, but only a council of administration
consisting of representatives of the various national groups of bond-
holders, including the Turkish. On the other hand the commission had
wide powers and guarantees, and the fear that it would be as ineffective as
its predecessors was not justified. The decree set up an executive committee
of the administration with its seat at Constantinople and authority to
collect and administer the ceded revenues, the total yield, after paying
administrative charges, being applied under its direction to redemption
and interest payments of the debt. Officials of the imperial government
had a consultative voice in the proceedings of the council, but it was
expressly stated that ‘under no conditions will they be able to interfere
with the administration’, and on the other hand the council could appoint,
employ, and dismiss government officials for its purpose as it saw fit. On
this basis the administration continued to the satisfaction of the bond-
holders and without interference or obstruction from the government for
the next twenty years.
But after salvaging at a cost the remnants of his European possessions,
‘Abd al-Hamid settled down to a tenacious defence of his life and authority
of too hand-to-mouth a character to provide any hope of the permanent
survival of his empire. The imbecile ostentation and showy petulance of
‘Abd al-‘Aziz and the half-sincere and half-baked reformism of the 1850’s
and 1860’s were replaced by a police regime whose sole claim to statesman-
ship lay in its circumspection. The sultan gauged successfully the disunity
of the powers and the limits of necessary concession to them. The main
lesson of the 1870’s was that, of all the powers, Russia alone did not
possess inexhaustible patience. Accordingly, her essential demands were
met, and the sultan soon made the discovery that she was then prepared
to leave him alone. But this meant in turn that he had to leave many of
his own discontented subjects alone, and increased the negative character
of his internal policy. When Russian troops evacuated the Balkan penin-
sula in the summer of 1879 the sultan threw away the main advantage that
he had gained under the Berlin Treaty by failing to send his own troops
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forward to garrison the Balkan Mountains. This was a recognition of the
futility of any challenge to Bulgarian nationalism, which it was assumed
that Russia would resent; and although eastern Roumelia remained under
Turkish rule until 1885 there was no serious attempt to consolidate the
Turkish position there. When after a bloodless revolution at Philippopolis
in September 1885 the two Bulgarias declared themselves united the sultan
did not intervene, although the tsar, incensed by the effrontery of the
Bulgarians in deciding something for themselves, rallied the Three
Emperors League to the support of the status quo. The most striking fact
about the subsequent Bulgarian crisis, which complicated international
relations for the next three years, was the passive role of the Porte
throughout. One of its few positive acts was an attempt to prevent the
appointment of the russophobe Sir William White as British ambassador
to Constantinople in September 1886.
Eight years later the Armenian problem produced an international
crisis which in some respects followed the Bulgarian pattern. As in
Bulgaria in 1876, an ill-advised rising in the Sassun region by Armenian
mountaineers in 1894 was crushed by Hamidian troops, and some
organised massacres followed. The powers went so far in May 1895 as to
present a reform scheme which the sultan accepted in October; but he
showed his lack of concern for these international interferences by
simultaneously giving authority for massacres in which 80,000 Armenians
are believed to have perished. On a smaller but equally publicised plane
were the Constantinople killings in August 1896; after an Armenian
attack on the Ottoman bank the Turkish mob murdered some 6000
Armenians in the capital. The revolutionary leaders made the tragic
mistake of assuming that by courting reprisals they would secure foreign
intervention. Russia’s opposition, however, made this impossible. The
Armenians, to a greater extent even than the ‘ungrateful’ Bulgarians, had
links with revolutionary groups in Russia, and the tsar saw no reason to
interfere with the Turkish repression of a movement which made no
appeal to Pan-Slav or Orthodox sentiment, and which might if successful
lead to the weakening of the useful Turkish buffer against the West. The
British were more actively hostile to the Turk and also, ultimately, less to
be feared. Naval demonstrations in October 1879 and September 1880 to
enforce boundary settlements and Asiatic reforms were, the sultan
decided, alarming only if they were supported by other powers, and he
asked in August 1880, and with more assurance as British indignation
mounted during the Armenian crisis in 1 895, whether the Royal Navy had
any ships that could ascend mountains. This progressive emancipation
from British tutelage was at the cost of his last chance of holding Egypt;
he hesitated until too late to intervene there in 1882, and he rejected a
conditional offer of British withdrawal in 1887. The chance did not recur.
But Germany, whose support he had been courting since 1880, was
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demonstratively friendly under the Emperor Wilhelm II from 1889 on-
wards, and the French were more interested in frustrating the British than
in harrying the Porte, although they co-operated with other naval powers
in April 1898 to set up an international administration in Crete after the
Christian islanders had revolted against Turkish rule in 1897.
Nevertheless, Austria was alone among the great powers in being in a
position to exploit the disintegrating position of Turkey in the Balkans.
She was able with the help of King Milan to dominate the economic and
political life of Serbia; Greece made approaches for an alliance in the early
i88o’s, and Roumania was drawn into a secret anti-Russian alliance in
1883; even in Bulgaria the Russians were on the defensive both eco-
nomically and politically after 1881. Bosnia joined the Austro-Hungarian
customs union in 1880. The link in the main Balkan railway line through
Serbia and Bulgaria was completed by August 1888, and this helped to
further Austria’s commercial penetration of the peninsula. The British,
whose favourable commercial position had depended largely on the low
cost of sea freights and access to the Aegean ports, were steadily losing
ground to Austrian salesmen of manufactured goods in Bosnia, Serbia,
northern Macedonia, and Bulgaria throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, a
process which was helped by the fact that Austrian goods, though often of
poorer quality, were usually cheaper, and presented with a better sales
technique and easier credit facilities. In Macedonia, the last substantial
area of Turkish rule and misrule in the Balkans and the obvious field for
a further crisis in the not too distant future, Austria was also the dominant
influence. It was considered to be axiomatic among the smaller states that
Macedonia would fall in due course to one or other of them; but they
could not agree on any plan of division, and in the meantime each sought
to strengthen its claims on economic, cultural, and historical grounds.
Austria had no intention of furthering these ambitions. She took care in
the Three Emperors Alliance negotiations in 1881 to insist on Russia’s
repudiation of propagandist activities in Macedonia, and she was pre-
pared for a time to encourage King Milan with hopes of territory in
northern Macedonia, but not to an extent which would jeopardise her
own strategical plans. These clearly pointed towards Salonika, where her
interest remained in spite of the fact that southern Macedonia never
provided a profitable field for Austrian commerce. A general Macedonian
revolt against Turkish authority finally broke out in August 1903 ; Austria
and Russia had anticipated it by proposals for reform in the previous
winter.
Of the immunity which he had secured from foreign interference in the
domestic affairs of the empire ‘Abd al-Hamld could make little effective
use, for he was not prepared either to devolve authority or to lay out his
restricted financial resources in long-term constructive programmes.
Turkey became a police state not only in its vigorous hunting down of
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real and imaginary plotters against the sultan, but in the meticulous
supervision which the sultan himself gave to all the affairs of state, parti-
cularly the more petty. This jealous preoccupation with details of admini-
stration — road-making, bridge-building, minor diplomatic appointments,
police reports on the private lives of innumerable unimportant citizens
and the like — took up a great deal too much of the despot’s time and
affairs of greater importance stagnated. The censorship was pervasive and
severe, and suspicion of the higher officials more marked than ever. The
familiar extravagances and corresponding parsimonies remained in some
cases. Favoured officials continued to enjoy heavy emoluments ; soldiers
remained unpaid. On the whole, however, the sultan trusted no one very
far. The constant changes of ministry and exiling of suspects were a
further obstacle to the rapid transaction of business. These were not, of
course, new features of the Turkish administration. Nor was the duel
between the palace and the Porte, although ‘Abd al-Hamld gave this futile
proceeding a new twist in his determination to control every detail of
public life and policy. Government by the Mabeyrt, the imperial secre-
tariat, would have been no better or worse than that of the Porte (which
was no model of efficiency) but for the inevitable congestion of business as
reports accumulated (even after preliminary sifting and classification by
the secretaries) on the sultan’s desk. The chief secretary in the later stages
of ‘Abd al-Hamld’s reign was Tahsin Pasha, who had a busy time strugg-
ling to keep all the sultan’s business in his own hands and his rival Izzet
Pasha el-Abid, the second secretary, at bay. There were other and usually
more transitory officials of the Mabeyn who served and flattered and rose
or fell in the sultan’s favour, providing him with spies in his own ministries
and a constant flow of reassuring or disturbing gossip about the machina-
tions of his alleged enemies, and leading to a further waste of everyone’s
time.
In these circumstances it is impossible to deny the sultan considerable
success in re-establishing the central authority, although there was little
statesmanship in his policy beyond a stubborn resistance to pressure,
domestic or foreign. The policy succeeded for a time because the great
powers were divided, not because ‘Abd al-Hamld had divided them ; in the
same way there was as yet no effective opposition at home to which his
domestic critics could appeal. It is equally the case that he failed during
the breathing space that had been given him in the 1880’s and early 1890’s
to create much positive loyalty to the regime.
The great efforts that were made from the beginning of the reign to
capitalise the sultan’s position as caliph, with claims to spiritual authority
over the Muslim world which were no better founded that the tsar’s claim
to protect the sultan’s Orthodox subjects, had some measure of success.
Their real purpose, however, was to embarrass foreign powers, parti-
cularly Great Britain, which might hesitate to quarrel with a Turkey
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emotionally supported by Muslims in India or elsewhere. There was indeed
no other purpose than this defensive one that the policy could serve, for
the sultan can scarcely have aspired to political control over the Indians,
Malays, Central Asian Turkis, Persians, and Pathans who were included in
the propaganda. One of the criticisms of the Young Turks in the 1890’s
was that he had failed to make sufficient use of the caliphate. Within his
own dominions there was more solid provision for the Muslim popula-
tion than he is usually given credit for, including the setting up of numerous
elementary schools in Anatolia; later (after 1900) came the Hejaz railway.
The Muslim workers of Constantinople, who so often felt themselves out-
smarted by their Jewish, Armenian, and Greek rivals, seem to have been
ready enough to regard the sultan as their protector ; the porters’ guild was
largely responsible for the massacre of Armenians in the capital in 1896.
For the most part, however, the sultan’s Muslim subjects, when their
mood was other than that of a traditional and somewhat fatalistic loyalty,
were developing grievances, and it was at the hands of his own Muslim
subjects that ‘Abd al-Hamid, like his two predecessors, lost his throne.
Up to the turn of the century, however, he kept his enemies, who
clearly did not exist only in his imagination, in their place. ‘All Su‘avi’s
attempt to rescue Murad V in 1878 was no more than a final and isolated
gesture of the New Ottomans, and it was not until the end of the 1880’s
that signs of a new revolutionary movement begin to appear. A revolu-
tionary society for the overthrow of the sultan was growing in Constanti-
nople between 1889 and 1897; it had close links with Young Turk exiles
abroad, mainly Paris. ‘Abd al-Hamid emerged successfully from his first
trial of strength with both groups. The Constantinople society probably
had its origin in 1889 among the students of the military medical school in
the capital. Its first leader, Ibrahim Temo, an Albanian, had talked to
Freemasons in Italy and sought to model the society on the Carbonari.
Membership was quickly extended to students of the military and naval
academies and other government schools. The society soon became
known to the authorities, and there were some arrests which did nothing
to check its growth ; more prominent men joined it and it began to recruit
members outside the schools; finally, it became over-confident, planned a
coup d'etat for August 1896, and was astonished when all the participants
were arrested just before the decisive hour. This was a tribute to the
efficiency of the sultan’s agents, but also a sad revelation of the incompe-
tence of the conspirators. In the following year he achieved a greater
success. This was none other than the overthrow of the Young Turk
movement abroad, a result aided but not created by disruptive tendencies
within the movement itself. The two most prominent figures at this period,
Ahmet Riza and Murat Bey, did not differ greatly in their rather un-
imaginative political programmes; they saw nothing fundamentally wrong
with the empire apart from ‘Abd al-Hamid. Get rid of him, restore
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Midhat’s constitution, reform the governmental organism so that it can
protect the laws against the encroachments of the palace, and * Oriental
flexibility may work wonders’, wrote Murat in 1897; ‘the population is
young, vigorous, temperate, devout; their crime is their blind obedience to
the infamous authorities’. Murat accepted the sultanate as indispensable;
‘without it Turkish power has no existence’. He was a Pan-Islamist
whereas Ahmet Riza was a devoted Comtist, whose Positivist convictions
set him resolutely against violence. It was however Murat, the pro-
tagonist of revolutionary violence and the recognised leader of the
movement against Ahmet Riza’s evolutionism, who suddenly gave up
the struggle along with nearly all of the Young Turks abroad.
The collapse owed much to the assiduity of Ahmet Jelaleddin Pasha,
one of the most trusted of ‘Abd al-Hamld’s agents, who discovered
Murat’s secret yearning for reconciliation and return; whatever the reason,
the bulk of the exiles agreed to abandon their propaganda in return for
empty promises of reform and a gradual amnesty, and many, including
Murat himself, went back to Constantinople. The arrangement was
described as a truce, and Murat was described as a hostage; but he became
a pensioner of the sultan, and Ahmet Riza, austere, uncompromising, and
ineffective, was left with a few associates to carry on his propaganda
almost alone.
It was in this rather extraordinary way that the Ottoman empire sur-
vived into the twentieth century, execrated in many foreign capitals, but
tolerated in all. In spite of the collapse of the very considerable regard
which ‘Abd al-Hamid had built up abroad in the 1880’s he could still look
back on the 1890’s as a vindication of his skill in immunising himself from
the malice of foreign and domestic foes. It was not until the almost chance
fusion of revived Turkish nationalist groups in 1907 that the Hamidian
despotism was at last seriously threatened.
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CHAPTER XIII
RUSSIA
O F all the European powers, Russia made the least concessions to
(the liberal spirit of the late nineteenth century. Until 1906 the
tsar remained an all-powerful autocrat; he could make and un-
make laws without the consent of his ministers, who were responsible to
him alone. Efforts at constitutional reform met with stubborn opposition
from conservative elements amongst the bureaucracy and landowning
gentry, the two main bulwarks of absolutism. The survival of the regime
depended ultimately upon the political inertia of the peasants who formed
the overwhelming majority of the population. Modern ideas were slow to
penetrate into the Russian village. To millions the tsar was still an almost
superhuman being who had their interests at heart and whose rule, they
long believed, brought them solid advantages.
An immense social and cultural gulf separated the masses from the tiny
educated minority. The position of this elite looked impregnable, so great
was its power and prestige. In reality it was poised over an abyss. A land of
extremes, Russia lacked a strong middle class. The most important inter-
mediate group, the intelligentsia, who provided the leadership of the
opposition movements, did not succeed in acquiring a mass following and
forcing the government to grant concessions until the turn of the century.
But the long and bitter struggle between the autocracy and its enemies
began in earnest soon after the accession of Alexander II.
Alexander’s reign (1855-81) opened auspiciously with the inauguration
of a broad programme of social, cultural and administrative reforms; it
ended with an unprofitable war and a wave of revolutionary violence, of
which the tsar himself was the most prominent victim. In part, this tragic
outcome could be attributed to Alexander’s own inconsistencies. He was
a reformer by circumstance rather than conviction. Well-intentioned but
weak-willed, he succumbed all too readily to pressure from small but influ-
ential reactionary groups concerned only to maintain their own privileges.
After the Polish insurrection of 1863, and an attempt on his life three years
later, he was still less willing to take risks; the reforms, although not
entirely suspended, were introduced with much modification and delay.
The tsar rapidly forfeited the public confidence which he had initially
enjoyed; and the new nationalism, to which he was half-inclined to look
for support, proved more of a liability than an asset.
After the Crimean War it had become clear that if Russia were to
progress, or even maintain her status as a great power, the first essential
was to liberate the 22 \ million serfs who still languished in complete
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dependence upon private landowners. The emancipation edicts of 19
February 1861 1 constituted a major turning-point in Russian history. Serf-
dom was finally abolished. But the great reform was motivated by raison
d'etat rather than disinterested concern for peasant welfare. It was the
product of a compromise between relatively enlightened bureaucrats, who
sought to ensure that the liberated serfs should at least be able to meet their
obligations to the state, and reactionary elements amongst the gentry, who
tried to make them pay for their liberty as dearly as possible. The 22 million
state and 2 million court peasants, who were the object of separate legisla-
tion, generally obtained better terms. In their case the reformers had not
the gentry’s interests to consider.
For the ex-serfs the provisions of the emancipation settlement were most
unsatisfactory. They were to conclude agreements with their masters
whereby they received allotments of land varying in size from area to area.
These were generally smaller than the plots which they had cultivated for
their own use under bondage. The average size was less than 3 dessyatines , 2
and still lower in the overcrowded central black-earth zone. They con-
sisted mainly of arable, since the proprietors reserved for themselves a
disproportionately large share of the pastures, meadows and forests.
These allotments had to be redeemed at grossly inflated prices, based upon
the rent previously paid, which bore no relation either to the market value
of the land or its potential yield. Redemption payments were made in
instalments through the village commune ( mir ), which was to hold the land
corporately until the debt had been paid. As many as forty-nine years
might elapse before the peasant could call his land his own. Pending
conclusion of an agreement, he was still obliged to pay rent or perform
labour-services for the landowner as before. Many hesitated to conclude
agreements on such burdensome terms, and as late as 1881 15 per cent of
former privately owned peasants were still serfs in all but name.
The commune was retained partly as a convenient fiscal and admini-
strative organisation and partly in the belief that it would prevent the
formation of a depressed landless proletariat. But its advocates failed to
appreciate sufficiently that, whatever its possible social merits, it was eco-
nomically retrogressive. It perpetuated the ancient three-field system of
farming, whereby each household possessed scattered strips in several
fields, which (in Great Russia, at least) were periodically redistributed to
ensure some rough correlation between the resources of each household
and its obligations. The more enterprising members thus had no incentive
to improve land which they might lose at any time. The peasants’ natural
individualistic instincts were crushed or diverted into unhealthy specula-
tive channels. The communal authorities punished severely those who
defaulted on their taxes or dues, or otherwise infringed the law, and issued
the passports without which travel beyond the village was forbidden.
1 Dates are old style. * 1 dessvatine = 2-7 acres.
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A myriad obstacles prevented peasants selling their allotments and with-
drawing from their communities. Above the commune stood the cantonal
( volost ) authorities which were conceived as organs of peasant self-govern-
ment but which in practice degenerated into obedient instruments of the
large army of officials, most of whom were appointed from the landowning
gentry who held supreme power in the countryside. The peasantry still
formed a separate ‘estate of the realm’, subject to discriminatory legisla-
tion. Though no longer serfs, they had not become citizens.
The onerous terms on which the peasantry were emancipated intensified
the crisis which was developing from the rapid increase of the rural popu-
lation — from some 50 million in the early 1860’s to 82 million in 1897, in
European Russia alone — without any corresponding increase either in
agricultural productivity or in opportunities for alternative employment.
Signs of impending trouble were the steadily mounting sums owed in tax
arrears and the famine which struck the rich grain-growing area of
Samara in 1873. The peasants felt instinctively that they could best
improve their lot by seizing the landowners’ estates and parcelling them
out amongst the needy. Rumours circulated of a supposed ‘golden
charter’ in which the tsar permitted them to take by force what was theirs
by right. For the present there were no revolts, but violence was never far
below the outwardly calm surface of the Russian countryside.
The landowners, too, had their grievances against the emancipation.
Of the sums due to them through the redemption operation, half was
retained by the state in payment of old debts, whilst the market-value of
the bonds they received depreciated sharply. Some squandered their
funds ; many withdrew from farming; few had the skill and determination,
and the necessary capital, to revolutionise the management of their estates.
With labour plentiful, it was tempting to try to maintain at least the facade
of bygone grandeur. The landowning gentry was a class in decline. Only
in the southern Ukraine did relatively prosperous new latifundia develop,
growing grain for western European markets. Within twenty years exports
quintupled, but yields remained low by international standards. From
the mid- 1 870’s North American competition brought about a depression
in Russian agriculture which hit landowner and peasant alike.
Russia was caught in a vicious circle: rural poverty hindered the
development of industry by restricting the domestic market; lack of
industry prevented the absorption of surplus agricultural population, the
chief cause of poverty. Despite energetic efforts by the government,
industrial progress during the quarter-century that followed the emanci-
pation remained unimpressive, particularly when compared with the
expansion taking place in western Europe. The principal centre for mining
and metallurgy was still the Urals, with its notoriously outdated technique.
By 1880 Russia’s output of coal and pig-iron had reached only 4 million
and i million tons respectively. The industrial labour force numbered less
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than half a million and was almost wholly unskilled; many workers still
owned land and returned to their villages annually for the harvest. Em-
ployers sought to compensate for low productivity by the intensive
exploitation common to most countries in the early stages of industrialisa-
tion. Wages were low and tended to fall; hours were long and factory
conditions generally appalling. The state did not as yet intervene in such
matters, but the police were quick to suppress any signs of labour unrest.
The most encouraging development in the economic sphere was the
ambitious programme of railway construction now undertaken, for the
lack of communications in a country so vast as Russia had hitherto con-
stituted a major obstacle to progress. The total track length, less than
iooo miles in 1861, exceeded 13,000 miles twenty years later. A network
of lines now linked the chief grain-growing areas with both capitals and
the Baltic and Black Sea ports. But the price paid for this achievement
was high. The Minister of Finance, M. von Reutem, concerned to restrict
government spending, favoured construction and ownership by private
companies raising their capital abroad. The Treasury sought to attract
promoters by offering them a generous guaranteed rate of interest or other
exceptionally advantageous concessions, and owing to the laxity of the
authorities speculation and corruption flourished.
Reutern’s laissez-faire policy had vocal critics in official circles, but he
justified his methods on financial grounds. The loans floated abroad
brought in foreign capital and helped to overcome the prevailing acute
shortage of money. Hitherto, free capital accumulation had been impeded
by the heavy demands of the state; Reutem now proclaimed it his aim ‘to
infuse new blood into the dried-up arteries of commerce’. An extensive
network of private banks was brought into being. The national accounts
were made public, and the Treasury endeavoured to prevent wasteful
expenditure by maintaining stricter control over other government
departments. A reserve fund was gradually built up to prepare for con-
version from paper to metallic currency — a first necessity in order to attract
foreign investors. But the war of 1877-8 with Turkey, which Reutem
vehemently opposed, postponed hopes of achieving stability for a genera-
tion. Russia emerged from the war with a greatly increased national
debt and a series of deficits on her annual budget.
The most serious aspect of the financial situation was the constant
uncertainty about revenue. The taxation system remained basically un-
reformed, the heaviest burdens continuing to fall upon those least able to
bear them. The archaic poll tax, to which peasants alone were liable, was
still the principal source of direct taxation, the idea of a graduated income-
tax being dismissed as dangerously revolutionary. The greater part of the
revenue was derived from indirect taxes, levied chiefly upon articles of mass
consumption. Thus Russia remained a land of sharp contrasts in wealth,
in which those responsible for economic policy all too frequently identified
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national interests with those of the privileged elite. Hopes that Alexander’s
‘great reforms’ would lead to striking progress towards general pros-
perity were disappointed.
The same story of unfulfilled promise can be told of Alexander’s other
reforms. Despite their limitations and inconsistencies, they helped to
spread respect for law and individual dignity in a land where, traditionally,
‘might was right’, and they helped to reduce social tensions by developing
feelings of common citizenship. On the other hand, though more far-
reaching than anything undertaken since the days of Peter the Great, they
left the bureaucratic structure still intact as they made no change in the
organisation of the central government. Moreover, the momentum of
reform was not maintained.
The most important changes concerned the judiciary and local govern-
ment. Russian justice was notorious for its arbitrary character, and few
doubted the need for radical reform, particularly after the emancipation
had given legal rights to milli ons of serfs who had hitherto been almost
completely under their masters’ jurisdiction. The statutes of 1864 were
encouragingly comprehensive and enlightened: the relationship between
the various courts was regularised and simplified; cases were to be heard
in public according to modern litigatory procedure, the guilt of the
accused being determined by jury; judges, formerly often ignorant and
corrupt, were to be chosen from amongst the best minds in the legal pro-
fession and appointed for life to ensure their independence ; measures were
taken to prevent abuses by the police when investigating suspects; and —
last but not least— barristers were allowed to practice and to maintain
their own autonomous organisation on western lines.
This promised a veritable revolution in the administration of justice.
But the reform was introduced slowly, and in some remote or politically
sensitive regions was never fully applied ; moreover, there were still several
important loopholes or omissions. The ‘justices of the peace’, elected
from amongst the local gentry to hear minor cases in rural districts, were
not fully integrated into the new system : they decided cases according to
the vagaries of local custom and there was no appeal against their verdicts.
Secondly, the reformers did not effect a thorough revision of the outdated
penal code but contented themselves with mitigating the severity of some
penalties. The worst forms of corporal punishment were abolished, but
peasants could still be beaten with rods by court order. Thirdly, there
remained spheres beyond the reach of the new system. Officials only
appeared in court if their superiors consented. The senate, supposedly the
citizen’s main shield against administrative abuses, remained unreformed :
its elderly members, who were political appointees, in practice cared more
for state interests than individual rights. More important still, political
suspects could be detained for long periods without trial and exiled by
‘administrative order’ without reference to the courts. The gendarmerie,
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or security police, exercised considerable authority, and offenders sen-
tenced to forced labour in Siberia endured conditions of extreme harsh-
ness and brutality. It was in the mines of Sakhalin or the dungeons of
Schlusselburg that the regime showed its darkest side: here the petty
official was supreme, and of legality there was little trace.
In a state where the bureaucracy wielded such power, an independent
judiciary was something of an anomaly, and conflicts between the courts
and the administration soon developed. In 1867 D. N. Zamyatin, who as
Minister of Justice had been closely identified with the reforms, was dis-
missed and replaced by the arch-conservative K. I. Pahlen. The reaction-
ary press continually attacked the lawyers as a potentially subversive
element and the jury as an inappropriate importation from the west. The
judiciary was soon forced on to the defensive, but the legal profession
offered stout resistance to efforts by officialdom to undermine or circum-
vent the law. The reforms, once granted, could not easily be revoked.
The local government statute of 1864 was an equally important step
forward. It provided for the establishment in each province and district
of European Russia (except the border territories) of a rural council, or
zemstvo. This consisted of a permanent executive board appointed by
an annual assembly of deputies; the deputies were elected by landowners,
peasants and townsmen, meeting separately. Broadly similar in purpose
and structure were the municipal representative institutions introduced
in most towns in 1870, but owing to the relatively small size of the urban
population these were less important than the rural zemstva. Their
significance was twofold: first, they provided a tenuous bridge across
the great chasm dividing Russian society by giving former serfs and
former serf-owners an opportunity to collaborate; secondly, they en-
couraged people who had hitherto been accustomed to expect the initia-
tive in all matters to be taken by some distant omnicompetent authority to
think and act for themselves, at least on local issues. The zemstva stimu-
lated wider political ambitions and were regarded by most liberals as the
first step towards a constitutional regime. The government, aware of these
implications, took care to limit their competence very precisely to such
matters as education, health, road-building and famine relief, and to sub-
ject their activities to close bureaucratic control. Members of different
zemstva were prohibited from meeting to co-ordinate policy, even on
questions of a purely technical nature. They had to obtain their revenue
almost entirely by taxing the already over-burdened peasantry. The con-
servative-minded gentry who set the tone in most councils, oblivious of
the many pressing social problems which confronted them, were in any
case inclined to cut down expenditure. But many zemstvo leaders devoted
themselves with exemplary idealism to the advancement of popular well-
being and felt frustrated when, with increasing frequency, their work was
hampered by official interference and obstruction.
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, Despite these formidable obstacles the practical achievements of the
zemstva were far from negligible. Wisely, they concentrated upon the task
of combating the almost total illiteracy that prevailed in the countryside.
By 1 88 1 they had brought into being some ten thousand elementary
schools. This was at least a beginning, although the quality of these
schools was not high and the main burden of supporting them fell upon
the volost and village authorities. However eager for enlightenment some
peasant communities might be, none could afford to spend much. The
educational coverage varied widely, and it was generally the poorest areas
that had the fewest schools. This was only one of many ways in which the
work of the zemstva suffered from lack of central co-ordination.
In this vital activity they met with more hindrance than encouragement
from the administration. D. A. Tolstoy, who replaced the liberal A. V.
Golovnin as Minister of Education in 1866, was a narrow-minded and
self-willed official, contemptuous of anyone who dared oppose his policies,
and less concerned with promoting the spread of knowledge than with
stamping out revolutionary ideas. He established a strong corps of
inspectors who acted as his agents in the provinces. The local school
boards, elected by the zemstva, were reformed and placed under the
supervision of a representative of the gentry.
The reaction was felt still more severely in the secondary schools which,
being generally run by the ministry, were more easily controlled. The
most controversial measure was the revision of the syllabus, whereby the
time spent in the study of classical subjects was considerably augmented.
Although opposed by many prominent officials as well as by the general
public, Tolstoy’s proposals enjoyed the tsar’s support and not even a
decisive defeat in the state council could prevent them from becoming law.
The classics were taught in a particularly pedantic manner, almost as
though the authorities hoped that constant conjugation of Latin verbs
might divert the pupils’ attention from the natural sciences, with their
awkward Darwinian implications. The result, naturally enough, was to
accelerate the drift to materialism among Russian youth. Tolstoy was not
opposed on principle to the teaching of science, which indeed he promoted
with some effect. His aim was primarily social and political : by drawing
a sharp distinction between the classical gymnasia and non-classical
realschulen, and by ordaining that only pupils from the former should be
admitted to university, he hoped to make the student body more select
and more reliable.
In fact, it was in the universities that Tolstoy suffered his sharpest
defeats. Student disturbances, originating with local grievances, soon
acquired a political flavour and brought a steady stream of recruits into
the radical camp. The government, after an initial attempt at repression,
had tried to solve the problem by granting the universities full internal
autonomy (1863). But the mood of rebelliousness persisted, and the fact
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that it was a student, D. V. Karakozov, who made a single-handed attempt
on Alexander’s life (April 1866) led the government to adopt the more
repressive policy of Tolstoy, who set up several official commissions to
devise stricter measures of control. But their labours were frustrated by
the university authorities, who clung doggedly to the rights granted them
in 1863. Tolstoy’s projected revision of this statute had yet to be approved
when, as a gesture to public opinion, he was obliged to resign (April 1880).
The means at his disposal had been inadequate to deal with a complex
sociological problem common to all countries at a certain stage of evolu-
tion: the problem of an emergent intelligentsia. The composition of the
student body was changing: sons of landowners and officials were being
joined by men whose fathers were priests, merchants, artisans or (very
infrequently) peasants. By 1 880 these so-called raznochintsy (literally, ‘ men
of various rank’) constituted over half the total number of students. The
heirs to a long tradition of abstract philosophical and political speculation,
they were the sharpest critics of existing conditions. The circulation of ideas
was also greatly facilitated by the expansion of the periodical press — ten
times as many papers and journals appeared between 1856 and 1865 as in
the previous decade — and the relaxation of the censorship. By the regula-
tions of 1 865 the government retained the power to suspend any periodical,
but it no longer questioned the right of public opinion to exist, and writers
were adept at circumventing the law.
Most intellectuals now rejected as too moderate the views of A. I.
Herzen, whose emigre newspaper The Bell (. Kolokol) had exercised such
phenomenal influence in Russia during the first few years of Alexander’s
reign. They preferred to follow the lead of writers connected with the
journal The Contemporary ( Sovremennik ) of whom the most important
was the socialist N. G. Chemyshevsky. His political philosophy combined
elements of Utopian idealism and economic determinism. With a wealth
of economic and sociological argument, he developed Herzen’s thesis that
the Russian peasants could set an example to the proletarians of western
Europe by finding their own way to a better social order based upon
collective ownership of land. More extreme were the views of D. I.
Pisarev whose cult of the individual ego and rejection of accepted social
and moral restraints earned the radicals the name of ‘nihilists’. Another
prominent figure whose colourful personality endeared him to young
Russian intellectuals was M. A. Bakunin, the fiery prophet of anarchism.
Their attempts to pass from words to deeds were not markedly successful.
In 1861 the clandestine organisation ‘Land and Liberty’ was broken up
by the police before its members could establish contact with the
peasantry. Chemyshevsky and Pisarev were arrested in the following
year. With the loss of its leaders, and the suspension of the two main
radical journals in 1866, the revolutionary movement was temporarily
reduced to ineffectiveness.
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Another reason for this was the changed intellectual climate in Russia
after the Polish insurrection of 1863. The nationalistic notes sounded in
Warsaw called forth a louder echo in St Petersburg and Moscow. Most
Russians agreed in dismissing the Poles’ struggle for liberty and in-
dependence as an oligarchic conspiracy against the integrity of the empire.
Support rallied to the government. Liberals who had been toying with
parliamentary ideas decided that such thoughts were premature; some
buried themselves in practical work on the new zemstva, others added their
voices to the patriotic chorus. M. N. Katkov, a leading Moscow publicist
who had warmly welcomed the reforms, emerged as the most vocal spokes-
man for the new nationalism. In the writings of I. S. Aksakov the doctrines
of the early Slavophiles underwent a subtle change, exalted religious
idealism yielding to the cruder motif of national self-assertion. The
journalists of Moscow inveighed against the bureaucrats of St Petersburg,
allegedly infected with the dangerous germ of western liberalism. The
government, they declared, must remain strong, and in particular con-
solidate its hold upon the borderlands. Only thus could Russia fulfil her
historic mission, expanding her territory in Asia and helping to liberate
the Balkan Slavs from alien rule.
The Pan-Slav aspect of the nationalist creed was emphasised most
strongly by such writers as N. Ya. Danilevsky, who gave it a fashionable
pseudo-scientific cachet by applying to international relations the Dar-
winian concept of a struggle for existence. But the name ‘Pan-Slavism’,
as conventionally applied, hardly suffices to cover a complex movement
concerned with much else besides Balkan policy. The Moscow nationalists
had many sympathisers in the army and the diplomatic service, and at
court. Even Alexander was at times inclined to look upon them with
favour. This influence, which could prove decisive in a crisis, compen-
sated for their failure to attract any significant mass support, either in
Russia or amongst the other Slav peoples.
The main obstacle to Slav unity was the Polish question. The ruthless
suppression of the insurrection was followed by a radical land reform
designed to weaken the politically unreliable gentry and win peasant
support. Religious and educational policy was also framed with the object
of eliminating Polish national sentiment. In the western provinces of
Russia itself, where there had been considerable sympathy for the rebels,
similar measures were carried out. At the same time latent national
antagonisms developed in the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine.
The Pan-Slav cause suffered a still more serious setback when the
Eastern Question was reopened by the Balkan revolts of 1875. The
Russian government vacillated, collaborating half-heartedly in inter-
national efforts to obtain a peaceful settlement, but at the same time
allowing itself to be carried forward by an upsurge of nationalist senti-
ment into a lone struggle against Turkey (April 1877-March 1878). By
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this date Russia’s military reputation, so severely shaken by her defeat in
the Crimea, had been greatly restored by several important reforms
carried out by Alexander’s energetic and liberally minded War Minister,
D. A. Milyutin — in particular the introduction of conscription (1874),
whereby the officer corps ceased to be an aristocratic preserve and service
obligations were distributed fairly amongst all social classes. The new
Russian army, a small permanent force backed by a large trained reserve,
had the makings of a formidable military instrument. But the call to arms
sounded before these reforms had taken full effect, in circumstances of
which Milyutin himself strongly disapproved. The advantage of surprise
had been lost; the easy victory confidently expected by the high com-
mand failed to materialise. The army still suffered from its traditional
weaknesses of muddled leadership and inefficient supply services. Not
until December 1877 was the vital key-point of Plevna taken, and the road
opened to Constantinople.
Carried away by this success, the high command imposed upon the
Turks the crushing peace of San Stefano. But this settlement aroused
fierce opposition from Austria and Great Britain, and for some weeks war
with the latter power seemed imminent. Anxious as he was to reinforce his
victory with a diplomatic triumph, Alexander had reluctantly to accept
the convening of a conference in Berlin to refashion the San Stefano
treaty. From the settlement that resulted (July 1878) Russia gained little:
Batum and Kars in Asia, and in Europe the return of the Bessarabian
districts lost in 1856. Nor could she salvage much for her Balkan pro-
teges: Bulgaria was reduced to one-third of its proposed size (although
ample opportunities remained for Russian penetration); Serbia and
Montenegro gained some territory, but no common frontier; and Bosnia
and Hercegovina came under Austrian occupation.
The Berlin Treaty aroused bitter resentment in Russia. Nationalists
denounced the government for yielding to Western pressure. But the real
cause of Russia’s diplomatic defeat — the fact that Bismarck’s Europe was
too small for successful expansion by a single power, least of all by Russia,
whose social and economic backwardness made her more dependent than
ever upon the goodwill of the Germanic empires — was not lost upon
Alexander. After a few months of fruitless isolation he set about repairing
the Dreikaiserbund of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, the linch-
pin of his foreign policy, which had been disrupted by the Balkan crisis.
In September 1879 he met William I at Alexandrovo; two years later the
alliance was ceremoniously re-established by his successor. From the
Russian standpoint, it now served principally to provide protection
against Great Britain: Germany and Austria undertook to help prevent
the Turks from allowing British warships to pass the Straits and threaten
her almost undefended Black Sea coast.
At home the results of the war were equally alarming for the govem-
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ment, since the suffering and dislocation which it caused gave added
strength to the opposition. Already in the early 1870’s revolutionary ideas
had gained much ground amongst the intelligentsia. Some radicals were
attracted by the ‘populist’ ( narodnik ) socialism of P. L. Lavrov and
N. K. Mikhailovsky, others preferred the more intoxicating teachings of
Bakunin; but all agreed upon the desirability of propaganda and agitation
amongst the peasantry. In the summer of 1 874 hundreds of young intel-
lectuals ‘went to the people’ with this aim in view, only to find themselves
speedily arrested by the police, sometimes with the co-operation of those
whom they had come to liberate. Lacking mass support, the revolu-
tionaries were not a serious threat to the regime, but the gendarmerie, for
reasons of its own, exaggerated the danger and kept the tsar and his
ministers in a perpetual state of alarm. But mass arrests and trials served
only to earn for the revolutionaries the sympathy of the general public,
and this was increased by exasperation at the conduct of the war. The
populists for their part were driven to retaliate by acts of terror. In
January 1878 a young woman of noble birth, V. I. Zasulich, avenged an
imprisoned fellow-revolutionary by shooting a senior police officer. Her
coup was followed by a number of other attempts, some of them success-
ful, upon the lives of prominent officials. Not all populists approved of
these tactics, and their party, ‘Land and Liberty’, which had been re-
established in 1876, collapsed in a welter of argument. Led by A. I.
Zhelyabov, those who did approve formed a new organisation, ‘The
People’s Will’ ( Narodnaya Volya), which placed the assassination of the
tsar in the forefront of its programme.
In response to the government’s appeals for public support, some
liberals cautiously petitioned for civil and political liberties : why should
the tsar refuse his own people the constitution he had granted the
Bulgarians? Alexander, alarmed by a narrow escape from death in an
explosion engineered by Narodnaya Volya in the Winter Pah re (February
1880), realised the advantages to be gained by driving a wedge between
the terrorists and their moderate sympathisers. A Supreme Executive
Commission was established and its head, M. T. Loris-Melikov, invested
with almost dictatorial powers. While security measures against revolu-
tionary violence were tightened, the press, zemstva and schools benefited
from a relaxation of administrative pressure. The success of this policy
allowed Loris-Melikov first to disband the commission, reserving for him-
self the key office of Minister of the Interior, and then to take a further step
forward by drawing up acomplex scheme for associating elected representa-
tives in the drafting of certain laws (December 1880). But these proposals,
which characteristically were worked out in secret, did not go far enough
to satisfy the moderate opposition, let alone appease the revolutionaries.
On 1 March 1881, returning to his palace after giving final approval to this
scheme, Alexander was fatally wounded by a terrorist’s bomb.
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The leaders of Narodnaya Volya had hoped that the assassination of the
tsar would at the least shock the government into granting the nation
constitutional liberties, even if it did not trigger off a peasant rising.
Neither of these expectations was realised. The assassination only
hindered the cause which the populists had at heart. The new tsar,
Alexander III (1881-94), was a stern and autocratic figure, respected for
his sincerity and conscientious devotion to duty but lacking in imagination
and intellectual ability. His natural conservatism was enhanced by the
circumstances of his father’s death, which he attributed to the weakness
and inconsistency of government policy in the preceding reign. He set out
to eliminate the threat of revolution by asserting his imperial prerogative,
consolidating authority at every level in society and bolstering up the
position of the landowning gentry. This experiment in reaction was fore-
doomed to failure: Russian society could not for long be forced back into
the strait-jacket from which it had so painfully emerged. Ultimately the
security of the autocracy depended upon the adoption of energetic
measures to solve the pressing problems raised by agrarian impoverish-
ment and nascent industrialism — a sphere in which the government’s
actions were tardy and inadequate.
The new tsar’s ideas were in large measure those of his ex-tutor and
close confidant K. P. Pobedonostsev, the Chief Procurator of the Holy
Synod. An archaic figure, Pobedonostsev was ill-equipped for the role of
a Russian Bismarck. He nourished a deep aversion for modern civilisa-
tion and dreamed of resurrecting in Russia an inert theocratic society,
rigorously safeguarded from corruption by such alien western ideas as
constitutional government or the rule of law. In practical terms his
programme resolved itself into an effort to stamp out dissent by police
measures, the promotion of Orthodox religious education and the russifi-
cation of the borderlands. At first Alexander III briefly toyed with the idea
of implementing Loris-Melikov’s proposed reform. But Pobedonostsev,
skilfully exploiting his fears and suspicions, succeeded in persuading him
to issue an imperial manifesto proclaiming his ‘ trust in the strength and
truth of autocratic power’ and hinting ominously that he would ‘intro-
duce order and justice’ into the institutions established by his father
(29 April 1881).
This was a direct challenge to the liberal ministers, who resigned or were
dismissed. But Loris-Melikov’s successor, N. P. Ignatyev, had Slavophile
sympathies and did not enjoy Pobedonostsev’s confidence. Desiring to
strengthen the autocracy by encouraging direct contact between tsar and
people, he rashly endorsed a fanciful project to summon a consultative
assembly of estates of the realm modelled on the medieval zemsky sobor.
Pobedonostsev used the incident to engineer his dismissal and replace-
ment by a more orthodox conservative, D. A. Tolstoy, whose educational
policies had so aroused public opinion during the previous reign. With the
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submissive I. D. Delyanov in the Ministry of Education, Pobedonostsev
appeared to be the complete master of Russia, interfering at will in
departments other than his own, although he had many enemies in high
places who contrived to obstruct and delay ultra-reactionary measures of
which they disapproved.
The new government succeeded with comparative ease in restoring calm
to the surface of Russian politics. The terrorist leaders were rounded up;
Zhelyabov and four colleagues were hanged, despite appeals for clemency,
and others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and exile. Those
who managed to emigrate surrendered themselves to barren theoretical
disputation, and efforts to resume terrorist activity met with no success.
The heroic age was now past. Most young intellectuals with narodnik
sympathies decided that they could best aid the popular cause by quietly
pursuing their professional careers and undertaking such social and phil-
anthropic work as the law allowed. The collapse of the revolutionary
movement also put a speedy end to the liberal agitation in zemstvo circles.
It was a peculiar feature of Russian liberalism that it lacked a firm social
basis, but was primarily an intellectual trend, fluctuating according to the
ebb and flow of the revolutionary tide. With the tightening of the censor-
ship regulations, most newspapers and journals critical of the government
closed down. The authorities made the most of the revulsion felt by many
moderates at tsaricide, and the zemstva, dutifully conforming to instruc-
tions, relapsed into their previous silence on national issues.
These cherished institutions were now very much on the defensive and
could only expand their activities on a modest scale. Tolstoy set out to
integrate them into the bureaucratic hierarchy, but was obliged to take
account of hostile criticism and modify his plans. The law of June 1890
gave provincial governors and other officials increased powers, in particu-
lar to confirm elections and appointments and to suspend implementation
of decisions deemed harmful to state interests. The electoral system was
arbitrarily manipulated to reduce the franchise and increase still further
the representation of the gentry. Similar measures were taken in 1892 in
relation to the municipalities.
Tolstoy’s policy reached its climax with the introduction, in July 1889,
of the ‘land captains’ ( zemskiye nachalniki ). These officials, chosen by the
governor from amongst local landowners and responsible to the central
government, became the veritable seigneurs of the Russian countryside.
They could veto decisions of volost or communal assemblies and punish
elected peasant authorities after summary proceedings. The justices of the
peace, who had earned a good reputation for fair dealing, were now
abolished and their functions transferred to the land captains. This
opened the way to arbitrary action and was a deliberate blow against the
integrity of the judicial system, already threatened by the undermining of
judges’ independence, restriction of jury trials and other measures. But
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none of these reforms produced the desired effect. It was fruitless to
entrust the gentry with greater political power at a time when their eco-
nomic strength was being steadily and inexorably whittled away. Despite
generous concealed subsidies from the Nobles’ Land Bank, established in
1885 with the express object of helping them to maintain their estates,
their holdings shrank by over one-third between 1877 and 1905 — from
73 million to 46 million dessyatines.
The government’s educational policy similarly accentuated the ten-
dencies characteristic of the preceding epoch. An expansion of facilities
occurred, but the credit for this is due rather to the zemstva and other
public bodies than to the state. In the elementary schools Pobedonostsev
ensured that emphasis was laid upon religious instruction, with the object
of inculcating a spirit of submissiveness to all authority, whether ecclesi-
astical or secular. Though the Synod did not acquire control of the entire
primary-school network, as had originally been intended, it established an
educational administration of its own, thus creating a rivalry which could
not fail to affect adversely the development of education as a whole.
Qualitatively the parochial schools were greatly inferior to those run by
secular authorities.
Secondary and higher education Pobedonostsev wished to make the
preserve of the dlite. Social segregation could hardly be introduced by
decree, but the government attempted to achieve this indirectly by order-
ing an increase in fees. The universities finally lost their autonomy (1884)
and acquired a barrack-like atmosphere which helped to foster sentiments
of opposition. The students generally managed to evade the ban on any
form of organisation and remained ‘the barometer of society’, ever ready
to respond to fluctuations in the political climate. Pobedonostsev could
deny educated Russians freedom of expression but could not win them
over to positive acceptance of his ideals.
He met with still greater disappointment in his efforts to secure the
intellectual allegiance of the non-Russian and non-Orthodox inhabitants
of the empire. Pobedonostsev had no respect for the principle of religious
toleration, and sought by every means to enhance the position of the
established Church. Orthodox missionary work was actively encouraged;
proselytism by adherents of other faiths was forbidden by law. He
harassed and persecuted the evangelical sects, particularly those whose
doctrines were tainted by social or political radicalism. Since his religious
policy was motivated chiefly by considerations of state security, its effects
were felt most severely in the borderlands, where religious dissent was
often closely allied to national sentiment.
The worst afflictions befell the six million Jews confined within the
permitted zone of residence, or ‘Pale of Settlement’. Both Alexander HI
and his successor, as well as many persons prominent in official circles,
held pronounced anti-Semitic views. The relatively enlightened assimila-
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tionist policy pursued in the previous reign was now abandoned. In 1882
Jews were prohibited from settling in rural districts even within the Pale,
thus increasing still further the overcrowding and impoverishment in the
towns. A numerus clausus fixed the proportion of Jews allowed to receive
secondary or higher education. The few privileged Jews who were still
permitted to live in cities outside the Pale suffered from various measures
of discrimination.
In Poland, as well as in the western and Baltic provinces, the schools
and the Orthodox Church became the principal instruments of russifica-
tion. The situation was particularly complex in the Baltic area. Russian
officials there competed with the German-speaking aristocracy for the
allegiance of the Letts, Lithuanians and Estonians, who were rapidly
developing political aspirations of their own. Alexander III cared little for
the ancient connection between the dynasty and the Baltic German
nobles. Although local government was left in their hands, the police and
judiciary were remodelled on the Russian pattern, and the educational
system was placed under centralised control. This led to the collapse of
the efficient Lutheran schools, which had a long history of distinguished
achievement, and to an actual decline in the rate of literacy. Serious con-
flict also developed over the status of thousands who hesitated between
the rival religious confessions. But Pobedonostsev’s drive for integration
failed. His methods were totally inadequate to combat the powerful
upsurge of nationalism now spreading through eastern Europe, and not
least within the Russian empire. The government’s repressive measures,
though not the direct cause of opposition to Russian rule by the national
minorities, as contemporaries often assumed, only fomented the centri-
fugal tendencies they were designed to forestall.
An additional reason for the failure of Pobedonostsev’s Baltic policy
was that Russia could not afford to allow this relatively minor issue to
disturb the good relations with Germany which she was now more con-
cerned than ever to uphold. It was ironical that Alexander III, who
sought to pursue a thoroughly traditionalist foreign policy, should end by
sanctioning a radical change of alignment. By 1887 Russia had become
estranged from Austria as a result of her involvement in Bulgaria and from
Germany as a result of Bismarck’s bellicose moves against France and ap-
parently successful rapprochement with Great Britain, Russia’s principal
adversary. The Dreikaiserbund lapsed; and the ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ with
Germany which replaced it, an engagement of much less value to Russia,
lasted only three years before being repudiated by Bismarck’s successor.
Russia showed no eagerness to overcome her consequent isolation by
concluding an alliance with republican France. Although a loose under-
standing was arrived at in August 1891, it was not until December 1893
that Russia reluctantly undertook to support France in the event of a
German attack. On the diplomatic plane, moreover, the new alliance
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proved no obstacle to the maintenance of good relations with Berlin and
Vienna. Indeed, Russia now embarked upon several years of harmonious
co-operation with Austria in Balkan affairs and with Germany. But
viewed in wider perspective the change of alignment was a milestone in
the decline of imperial Russia. Instead of being allied to empires whose
political and social order corresponded to her own, Russia became in-
creasingly dependent on the friendship and credit of France. The financial
aspect of Franco-Russian relations rapidly gained in importance until, by
1905, the alliance had become a vice of steel from which Russia could
escape only at the price of revolution. She did not, of course, suffer any
actual loss of sovereignty; but the frustration in 1905 of the Russo-
German Bjorko agreement showed the extent to which she had
surrendered her freedom of action. She could not afford to alienate the
ally whose financial aid assured the continued existence of the regime.
Reliance upon foreign credit was inevitable: Russia’s domestic re-
sources could not provide the capital necessary for development. The
government, though not directly responsible for the country’s economic
backwardness, for many years did far too little to overcome it. Alex-
ander Ill’s first Minister of Finance, N. Kh. Bunge, although not a
statesman of vision, realised the importance of fiscal reform. In 1882,
shortly after the last ex-serfs had been compulsorily transferred to a
redemption basis, the amount of these dues was reduced; and in 1885 the
inequitable poll-tax was belatedly abolished. The Treasury offset its losses
by almost doubling the rent paid by peasants on state-owned land and by
further increases in indirect taxation. Despite their modest scope, Bunge’s
reformist measures aroused strong criticism from his ministerial colleagues,
who forced him to resign (January 1887). His successor, I. A. Vyshne-
gradsky, was an experienced financier whose attention was chiefly focused
upon the international money market. The long-suffering peasantry were
entrusted to the ministrations of Tolstoy and his successor P. N. Durnovo,
who both saw the agrarian problem purely from a security point of view.
The peasants were expected to submit unquestioningly to the land captains
and other representatives of authority. A decree of 1886, ineffective in
practice, required official approval for dissolutions of large peasant
families of the traditional patriarchal type, which were succumbing to the
inexorable pressure of individualism. The government also took the rural
commune under its wing: even after they had redeemed their allotments,
peasants were not to be free to withdraw from the mir and exercise full
rights of ownership over their land unless their fellow-villagers consented.
The inadequacy of this approach was clearly demonstrated by the cata-
strophic famine of 1891-2 which, with the accompanying cholera epi-
demic, cost some half a million lives. In the absence of sufficient reserves
of grain even a modest crop failure brought widespread starvation. More
fundamental action to raise mass living-standards was obviously essential.
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The Ministry of Finance was now entrusted to S. Yu. Witte, the most
capable servant of the imperial regime in its declining years. An experi-
enced administrator who mixed easily in business circles, he realised that
Russia’s role as a world power depended upon the rapid development of
her rich natural resources. Industrialisation, he believed, was fully com-
patible with the maintenance of tsarist autocracy; indeed, only by under-
taking an ambitious programme of guided economic development could
the absolutist regime hope to survive. If the state took the initiative, he
argued, it would obtain the w illin g co-operation of private enterprise and
the esteem of the general public. Witte’s forceful and somewhat contra-
dictory character, coupled with his extreme vanity, earned him many
powerful enemies, but for ten years he was virtually an economic dictator.
The means he employed to foster industrial progress did not differ in
principle from those of his predecessors, but they were better co-ordinated
and applied with greater sense of purpose. In the 1890’s, after a decade of
consolidation and financial regularisation, Russia embarked upon a new
spell of railway construction, financed mainly by the state. By far the
most important project, both economically and strategically, was the
Trans-Siberian line, commenced in 1891 and completed within the short
span of fourteen years. By 1905 the total length of railway track had
reached approximately 37,500 miles, of which some two-thirds were
state-owned.
Domestic industry could now supply much of the rails and other metal
equipment required. In the 1880’s a new mining and metallurgical centre
sprang up in the Donetz basin. By 1900 this supplied half of Russia’s
output of pig-iron, which stood at 3 million tons ; by this date coal pro-
duction had reached 15 million tons. This was only a small fraction of
world output, but in the production of one increasingly important com-
modity, oil, Russia at this time took first place as a result of rich dis-
coveries in Transcaucasia. The textile industry, centred in the Moscow
region and in Poland, made rapid strides, assisted by the development of
cotton planting in central Asia. In the last fifteen years of the century
total industrial output nearly trebled, progress being particularly marked
in the late 1890’s. By 1900 some two and a half to three million workers
were employed in industry and transport.
This industrial expansion owed much to the government’s tariff policy,
which inclined increasingly towards protection. Dues on imported
industrial products and raw materials were continually raised during the
1880’s, and two large general increases followed in 1890 and 1891. This
led to trouble with Germany, now gradually replacing Britain as Russia’s
chief trading partner. An even more important characteristic of her in-
cipient industrial revolution was the reliance upon foreign investment,
which by 1900, after an eightfold increase in twenty years, comprised
almost one-third of the total capital in private Russian industry. Foreign
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capital also found its way into Russia in the form of direct loans to the
government. It was above all the desire to attract foreign investment and
reduce heavy interest charges which led Russia to adopt the gold standard
(1897), a step which greatly strengthened her financial position.
But the price of this aid, whether direct or indirect, was reflected in the
constantly mounting figures of Russia’s indebtedness. During the years
1894-1903, it has been estimated, annual payments to foreign creditors
averaged some 300-400 million roubles. By 1904 the state debt alone
exceeded 6\ milliard roubles, of which almost half was owed abroad.
Since it was only through foreign loans that the budget was balanced at
all, the need for credit continually increased and the prospects of regaining
solvency seemed ever more remote.
Witte’s right-wing critics feared that excessive dependence upon foreign
bankers endangered Russia’s sovereign status, whilst the left urged
priority for agrarian reforms that would raise the peasants’ revenue-
yielding capacity. Witte could reply that, without the aid of foreign capital,
industrialisation would impose far greater hardships upon the peasantry
(an argument borne out by later experience in the Soviet Union); that
industrialisation offered the only long-term hope of solving the agrarian
question and breaking out of the vicious circle which hindered economic
progress; and that therefore a certain strain in the economy must be
accepted as inevitable. The faster Russia industrialised, the less painful
the transition process would be.
But it was equally true that the peasant taxpayer could ill afford in-
creased burdens, even in the worthy cause of industrial progress and
ultimate general prosperity. During Witte’s tenure of office state revenue
doubled. By 1903 one-quarter of total receipts were provided by the
government spirits monopoly, established in 1 894. This in effect gave the
Treasury a vested interest in perpetuating drunkenness, the acknowledged
bane of peasant life. Another of Witte’s dubious revenue-producing
measures, state control of sugar-beet production (1895), kept prices
artificially high and made sugar more of a luxury than ever at the peasant’s
table.
By the turn of the century the growing misery in the villages was
revealed by official data. Investigators in Tula province (1902) found
peasant families living in insanitary huts with leaking roofs, using manure
for fuel, and subsisting on a thin diet of bread, kvass and potatoes. In the
late 1890’s one-fifth of all army recruits were rejected as physically unfit.
At 35 per thousand, Russia’s mortality rate was the highest in Europe;
characteristically, it was higher in the countryside than in the towns.
From the government’s point of view, perhaps the most ominous sign was
the ever-increasing sum owed in tax arrears, which in 1896-1900, despite
local cancellations and deferments, exceeded by one-fifth the average
annual assessment.
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How could the peasant hope to meet his obligations to the state and
still provide for himself and his dependents? Purchase of additional land
was rendered difficult by lack of adequate credit facilities. The operations
of the Peasant Land Bank, founded by Bunge in 1882, were restricted by
pressure from powerful landowning interests. Between 1861 and 1905, it
has been estimated, some 16 million dessyatines had been bought by
peasants actually engaged in farming, over half of this through the Bank.
Much of this land was bought, either by peasant communities and associa-
tions or by individual peasants, directly or indirectly, from the gentry,
whose landholdings decreased by 27 million dessyatines (from 73 million
to 46 million) between 1877 and 1905. It was simpler to lease land, where
it was available; but the heavy demand in areas of acute shortage caused
rents to soar, especially for the short-term leases concluded by the poorest
peasants, who, driven by sheer need, tended to exhaust the soil. Nor did
leasing land encourage technical improvements. From the early 1890’s
the government belatedly began to facilitate migration to the spacious
untilled lands of Asiatic Russia, and by 1904 nearly one million prospec-
tive settlers had crossed the Urals. But many who left without adequate
preparation, disregarding official advice, returned in disillusionment.
Migration could in any case absorb only a fraction of the natural growth
of population in European Russia. Statistics show that, however great
the land shortage, peasants preferred to seek employment nearer home —
either on the large estates in the southern Ukraine, which attracted a
million seasonal labourers annually from the over-populated central
districts, or in the cities and industrial settlements.
Here the peasant was suddenly plunged into a totally unfamiliar civilisa-
tion, where the rapid tempo of life stood in sharp contrast to the slow
rhythm of the countryside. This sense of estrangement intensified his
natural aversion to industrial conditions, still almost as harsh as ever.
Bunge regulated the working hours of women and juveniles (1882) but
pressure from certain industrial interests prevented the law from being
generally enforced. It was not until 1897 that the working day for men
was limited to ii£ hours. The new factory inspectors were soon intimi-
dated into subservience to the authorities. Wages, though now paid
regularly in cash, were kept low by the influx of rural unemployed.
Strikes and any form of labour organisation were strictly outlawed. The
industrial workers, concentrated for the most part in large enterprises,
formed a natural reservoir of revolutionary sentiment, abundantly fed by
the swelling flood of peasant discontent. In the cities there was open
turbulence, rendered still more ominous by the mood of sullen resentment
in the villages. By the turn of the century absolutist Russia, despite a
superficial appearance of stability, was heading for revolution.
For the more organised character which this mass opposition acquired
it was primarily indebted to the intelligentsia. The famine of 1891 shocked
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Russian society from the enforced passivity of the preceding decade. As
the activities of the zemstva again expanded so also did the numbers and
self-confidence of their employees (teachers, doctors, statisticians, etc.),
who made their influence felt in professional and other bodies. The revival
also affected the elected zemstvo deputies, many of them members of the
gentry whose public spirit proved much stronger than the class egoism
upon which Tolstoy had reckoned. It was not, however, the compara-
tively feeble voice of Russian liberalism which set the tone of public
opinion. In intellectual circles the debate on the perennial question of
Russia’s future was dominated by the partisans of populism and Marxism.
The former laid the blame for the peasants’ misery upon capitalism,
which they saw as something alien, artificially superimposed upon
Russia’s pristine agrarian economy by deliberate state action. For the
Marxists capitalism was a natural organic growth, an inevitable stage in
social development, which held out the prospect of great material pro-
gress as well as of a revolution led by the industrial proletariat. They
condemned the populists as Utopian and reactionary; their opponents
charged them with sharing Witte’s callous indifference to the people’s
immediate welfare. In this dispute between the head and the heart of the
Russian intelligentsia, victory lay with the head: in a scientific age, the
ethical idealism of the populists had less appeal than the cold logic and
apparent certainties of Marxist doctrine.
Intellectuals with Marxist convictions sought to translate their theories
into practice by obtaining leadership of the incipient labour movement
and diverting the workers’ attention from industrial to political objectives.
They achieved some success when a major strike broke out in the
St Petersburg textile mills (1896) and a local labour union was formed which
found emulators in other cities. But these clandestine organisations were
soon broken up by arrests and during the next few years the number of
political strikes remained low. In 1898 a Social-Democratic party was
formed but it did not command any significant mass support.
The labour movement was a more powerful force in the border regions,
where nationalism and socialism were curiously interrelated, part allies
yet part rivals. The Ukrainian opposition was predominantly socialist and
integrationist, but nationalist groups emerged after 1900. In Poland con-
ciliatory tendencies prevailed for twenty-five years after the defeat of the
1863 insurrection, but then yielded to an upsurge of political activity.
The strongest group was the Polish Socialist party, which placed in-
dependence in the forefront of its programme. To the right stood the
National Democrats, to the left the ultra-orthodox Marxists, who were
both more internationally minded. Russia’s strongest revolutionary organi-
sation was the Jewish social-democratic Bund which, however, was pre-
vented by friction from collaborating closely with non- Jewish opposition
groups. Many Jews were attracted by the more nationalistic current
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
represented by Zionism. Farther north, the Baltic provinces now became
the scene of intense political activity, with social-democracy prevailing in
Latvia and moderate nationalism in Estonia. Two new recruits were added
to the army of discontented nationalities : the Finns and the Armenians.
In 1899 the imperial government, bent on integration, virtually abrogated
Finland’s ancient constitutional rights, and the entire nation rallied
under liberal leadership in an impressive campaign of passive resistance.
In Armenia, where opposition arose over the government’s tacit support
for Turkey during the massacres of 1896, nationalism proved a much
stronger force than socialism, as was also the case in Georgia.
The acute tensions which had by now developed in Russian society
posed a formidable threat to the absolutist regime. It could overcome them
only by showing extreme foresight and flexibility. But the throne was
next occupied by a monarch conspicuously deficient in such qualities.
Nicholas II (1894-1917), last of the tsars, inherited his father’s faults
without his modest virtues. Though a stubborn advocate of firm govern-
ment, he was weak in character and in intellect. He mistrusted ministers
whose abilities surpassed his own, preferring to rely on backstairs advisers,
often of unsavoury reputation. There was thus ample scope for intrigue
and jostling for power within the ruling group, the effects of which were
felt throughout the bureaucracy. In particular, a rivalry developed be-
tween the Ministries of Finance and the Interior which to some extent
reflected fundamental differences on policy. Nicholas had no sympathy
for the dynamic absolutism contemplated by Witte; he was a tradition-
alist, with a most naive view of his functions as autocrat. By his own
actions he helped to isolate the monarchy from the whole of Russian
society, not excluding even the most moderate elements who were its
natural allies against revolution.
Shortly after his accession Nicholas crudely dismissed as ‘senseless
dreams’ the zemstvo leaders’ aspirations for constitutional government.
This declaration was intended to reproduce the effect of Alexander Hi’s
inaugural manifesto, but it stimulated sentiments of opposition. Led by
D. N. Shipov, a nobleman of impeccably conservative views, the chair-
men of many zemstvo executives met and established a ‘Bureau’ to
co-ordinate their activities. I. L. Goremykin, the vacillating Minister of
the Interior, became alarmed and ordered it to be dissolved. But his
inconsistencies led his enemies, amongst them Witte, to plot his downfall
(1899). His successor, D. S. Sipyagin, pursued a straightforward policy of
obstruction which widened the breach between the government and
society. At this time of widespread distress, the contrast between the
zemstvo’s achievements and the ineptitude of the bureaucracy was particu-
larly striking. Yet Witte had compiled a confidential memorandum
warning the tsar that the zemstvo were fundamentally incompatible with
the maintenance of autocracy and, although he carefully refrained from
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recommending their dissolution, it was widely feared that the government
had such a step in mind. Efforts to form a national organisation were
resumed with greater determination. The initiative was taken by a group
of radical intellectuals led by P. B. Struve, a convert from Marxism to
liberal democracy. In June 1902 he began publication of an illegal news-
paper, Liberation ( Osvobozhdeniye ), which played an important part in
shaping moderate opinion.
A few months previously peasant resentments had flared into revolt in
two Ukrainian provinces. The rioters were indiscriminately whipped into
submission, whilst the fundamental causes of agrarian unrest were
examined by a ‘Special Conference’ established by Witte. This body,
unlike numerous predecessors, was conceived on a grandiose scale, with
hundreds of local committees which zemstvo leaders were in many cases
invited to join. Despite official restrictions the latter were often able to
widen the scope of the discussions and advance demands for social and
political reform. The liberals thus obtained a valuable opportunity to rally
around a common practical programme.
In the meantime the peasant disturbances had given great encourage-
ment to the populists, now reborn as ‘Socialist Revolutionaries’, who
undertook extensive propaganda in the countryside. More spectacular,
though ultimately perhaps less significant, was their terrorist campaign,
which claimed amongst its first victims the Minister of the Interior (April
1902).
His successor was V. K. Plehve, a former police chief who had his own
characteristic methods of dealing with the crisis. Seeking to reduce the
zemstva to acquiescence, he gave private assurances that he favoured con-
ciliation. But in practice the zemstva continued to be harassed, and the
multifarious concessions granted by an imperial manifesto of 26 February
1903 were discouragingly vague and trivial. The liberals soon dismissed
Plehve’s overtures as insincere. In July 1903 they took the decisive step of
forming a clandestine organisation, ‘The Liberation League’, which when
formally constituted six months later adopted a radical programme calling
for a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage, extensive social
reforms, and national self-determination.
Plehve met with greater initial success in his efforts to gain control of
the labour movement by forming unions managed by police agents. The
industrial workers, although increasingly responsive to social-democratic
agitation, were not firmly committed ideologically. A group of emigre
Marxist intellectuals, prominent amongst whom was V. I. Lenin,
attempted to reconstitute the party by recruiting support for their news-
paper, The Spark ( Iskra ). But at a congress called in 1903 personal and
doctrinal differences among the leaders of the infant party split it into
two warring factions, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, each claiming the
mantle of Marxist orthodoxy. This fluid situation gave Plehve his chance.
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Workers in Moscow, eagerly grasping at any opportunity to organise,
flocked to join unions established by the local security chief, S. V. Zubatov.
But the police, to avoid losing control, were obliged to endorse limited
strike action, which led to complaints by employers and recriminations
within the government. A similar endeavour to weaken the Bund by
forming an ostensibly ‘independent’ Jewish labour party accidentally
ignited a general strike throughout the Ukraine (July 1903). The outcome
of Zubatov’s activities was the reverse of that intended: a growth in
revolutionary sentiment amongst the workers.
Plehve did not shrink from more vicious methods: in April 1903 he
connived at a serious pogrom at Kishinyov, Bessarabia, in which many
Jews lost their lives. In Finland and Armenia measures of russification
were ruthlessly pressed forward. But the tide of revolution still mounted.
Plehve saw one hitherto untried means of diverting it : ‘ a victorious little
war’. Towards such a catastrophe Russia was now being irresistibly led
by her rulers’ eagerness for profit and glory in the Far East.
For thirty years after the Treaty of Peking (i860) Russia had been
content to consolidate her position on the Pacific seaboard. But the dis-
integration of China awakened her latent expansionist ambitions. Witte,
anxious to avoid war in Russia’s present state of weakness, favoured a
policy of limited military commitments and gradual economic penetra-
tion, to be carried out as far as possible in collaboration with the Chinese.
But the generals and diplomats for the most part preferred a less subtle
policy of outright territorial annexations. At first Witte prevailed, but
after 1898, when Russia acquired the Port Arthur enclave, her influence
rapidly spread through the whole of Manchuria, and aroused determined
opposition not only from China but also from Japan and Great Britain.
Russia could have bought off Japan by conceding her rights in Korea
equivalent to those she reserved for herself in Manchuria, but on several
occasions she let slip opportunities to negotiate a bargain on such lines.
After 1901 Nicholas fell increasingly under the influence of a group of
unscrupulous adventurers, who eventually obtained the support of Plehve
and secured Witte’s dismissal (August 1903). Power now finally passed
from the regular administration to this irresponsible clique. Arrogantly
contemptuous of the Japanese, Nicholas and his advisers failed to prepare
for the conflict which their aggressive actions rendered inevitable, and the
war, which broke out unexpectedly in January 1904, was an unrelie\ ed
series of military and naval disasters. After the final catastrophe of
Tsushima (14 May 1905), Russia was obliged to sue for peace. By the
Treaty of Portsmouth in August Japan gained southern Sakhalin and
Port Arthur, and recognition of her rights in Korea, but in northern
Manchuria Russia retained her mastery. It was an extremely modest price
to pay for a peace which she so desperately needed.
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For by this time the domestic situation had been transformed beyond
all recognition. From the start public opinion had generally condemned
the war as transparently against the national interest. The responsibility
for its outbreak and inefficient conduct fell foursquare upon the govern-
ment. The war acted as a catalyst, focusing the separate currents of oppo-
sition into a single surge of indignation, which rose ever higher with the
news of each successive defeat. By its own actions the absolutist regime
provided a powerful argument in favour of responsible government.
Demands which had hitherto appealed mainly to the educated few — for
civil rights, political liberties, and constitutional reform on democratic
lines — rapidly commanded mass support. The common opposition to
autocracy gave a deceptive appearance of solidarity to a movement which
in reality was composed of many diverse elements, each with its own
motivations and objectives.
The crisis exposed mercilessly Nicholas’ lack of statesmanlike qualities.
Haughtily scornful of the opposition, whose strength he greatly under-
estimated, he played for time, turning helplessly from one desperate ex-
pedient to another, consistent only in his determination to yield none of
his power. After Plehve’s assassination (15 July 1904) he hesitated for a
month before naming as his successor the honest and intelligent P. D.
Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who set out to re-establish mutual confidence between
the government and the public. Inexperienced in politics, Mirsky was
soon forced to go farther along the road of concession than he wished.
Not realising the implications of his action, he authorised zemstvo leaders
to hold a national congress at which they intended to discuss constitu-
tional questions. Once granted, permission could not easily be withdrawn
without prejudicing the success of his policy. The congress justified the
government’s worst fears by enthusiastically endorsing a comprehensive
reform programme culminating in a demand for a national assembly,
which two-thirds of those present wished to endow with legislative power.
They concluded by appealing to the tsar to summon such an assembly
immediately (9 November 1904).
Mirsky now devised a compromise plan for the admission of elected
zemstvo representatives into the state council, to which Nicholas first
reluctantly consented ; but then, warned by Witte that it was the first step
towards a constitution, he changed his mind. A decree of 12 December
promised reform on various matters, including some raised by the
zemstvo congress; but these measures were to be elaborated by the usual
bureaucratic procedure, without consulting any elected representatives;
and the Fundamental Laws of the Empire, it was declared, would be
‘unshakably maintained’. A peaceful compromise with moderate opinion
was thus ruled out. Instead, Russia had to win its constitution as an
indirect result of revolutionary action.
Within less than a month the people of the capital had put forward their
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own demands. Here Zubatov had established a labour union which, like
its predecessors, emancipated itself from police control. Its leaders,
prominent amongst them a priest of uncertain loyalties, G. A. Gapon,
adapting themselves to the mood of their followers, endorsed a plan to
hold a giant demonstration before the Winter Palace, during which the
tsar was to be presented with a petition calling attention to their economic
grievances and demanding fundamental political reforms. The authorities
were warned of the plan but took no effective counter-measures. Early on
9 January 1905 the marchers, unarmed and some bearing icons and
portraits of the tsar, were cold-bloodedly shot down. About one hundred
were killed, hundreds more injured. The massacre dispelled the last shreds
of popular trust in the autocracy, which henceforward became a symbol
of oppression capable of evoking violent passions.
A wave of industrial unrest spread spontaneously throughout the
country. In Warsaw and Riga there were clashes with troops and further
loss of life. In Transcaucasia rioting broke out between Armenians and
Tartars. The peasants, too, were thoroughly aroused. Their action took
the form of illicit pasturing of cattle and cutting of timber, refusal to work
or pay rent, and sometimes even pillaging of estates and seizure of land.
By the summer one-sixth, and by the autumn one-half, of the districts of
European Russia had been affected by disturbances. In the Baltic pro-
vinces and in Georgia events took a particularly severe turn, with the
peasants expelling landowners and officials and establishing their own
ad hoc revolutionary committees. Even more serious were the mutinies
which broke out in the navy, where discipline had been shattered by
defeat. The army was slower to follow the navy’s example but morale was
low and many units were politically unreliable.
This upheaval was an elemental, and often anarchic, movement, which
owed relatively little to the exertions of the small organised opposition
groups. All of these now swung sharply to the left in an effort to catch up
with the rapid march of events. In all the border regions nationalist
parties yielded ground to their socialist rivals. The populists helped to
create an All-Russian Peasant Union, which, however, had insufficient
opportunity to gain support on a nation-wide scale. The Social-Democrats
discarded their doctrinal scruples and endorsed direct action by the
peasants. The Bolsheviks especially were keen to win rural support, but
had negligible success. Their strident propaganda for armed insurrection
found favour only with a comparatively small ultra-militant element in
the cities. The more prosaic and orthodox Mensheviks sought to en-
courage the formation of trade unions and to capture other rights and
liberties by taking advantage of the breakdown in governmental authority.
Their tactics had much in common with those of the Liberation League,
which succeeded in establishing a number of professional organisations,
soon loosely co-ordinated into a League of Unions.
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It was this body, led by P. N. Milyukov, which was largely instrumental
in pressing the zemstvo liberals still farther to the left. In April 1905 they
held a second congress, on a more representative basis, which endorsed by
a large majority the demand for a constituent assembly elected by universal
suffrage, as well as a radical programme of social reform, including even
the expropriation of some private estates against limited compensation.
One month later, meeting under the impact of Tsushima, delegates of
zemstva and municipalities approached the tsar personally with another
appeal for the immediate convocation of a national assembly. Nicholas’
reply was as usual contradictory, and in July they met again to declare
their intention of seizing liberty by ‘entering into the closest contact with
the broad popular masses’. This appeared to promise the absorption of
the liberals into the general revolutionary torrent. But the rising tide of
peasant violence caused a more cautious note to be sounded. A small
minority rallied to Shipov, who was prepared to accept a purely consulta-
tive assembly, elected by restricted and indirect franchise. But even
Shipov could not accept a puppet assembly such as the government now
proposed. The plan for a ‘State Duma’ prepared by A. S. Bulygin, the
ineffectual new Minister of the Interior, evoked a storm of protest.
The fate of Bulygin’s proposal was determined, not by the liberal oppo-
sition, but by those he planned to disfranchise. Early in October a railway
strike broke out in the Moscow area. It spread like wildfire to other
regions and industries until the whole country unexpectedly found itself
gripped by a general strike. The cities were paralysed; even schools and
government offices closed down. The government was understandably
panic-stricken at this startlingly effective demonstration of national opposi-
tion. Nicholas summoned Witte, who with his usual realism pointed out
that, unless he were prepared to institute a military dictatorship, the tsar
must grant a constitution. Nicholas had no real choice. On 17 October
an imperial manifesto promised full civil liberties and a Duma with
legislative powers, elected on an extended franchise. Witte was elevated to
the status of Prime Minister and charged with forming a new government.
A new era in Russian history had begun. But the promises of the
‘October Manifesto’ had yet to become reality. Witte faced the super-
human task of consolidating the new order against powerful opposition
from left and right. The manifesto did nothing to appease the revolu-
tionary spirit in the country at large. On the contrary, peasant disturb-
ances now reached their zenith, whilst the industrial workers, emboldened
by their success, were eager to continue the struggle until absolutism had
been irrevocably overthrown and a constituent assembly called to plan a
new democratic future. Such views were energetically promoted by the
socialist parties, and in particular by L. D. Trotsky, a dissident Men-
shevik, who became the most prominent figure in the St Petersburg
Soviet. This was an organisation of factory representatives, formed for
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liaison purposes during the strike, which now consolidated its authority
in the capital, established contact with other centres and became virtually
a rival government. The same radical demands were voiced by the liberals,
now emerging as the Constitutional-Democratic (‘Kadet’) party. Sus-
pecting that Witte neither would nor could implement consistently the
principles of the October Manifesto, they rejected his invitations to join a
coalition government and offered him only conditional support. Even
Shipov’s moderates, now known as ‘Octobrists’, refused to participate in
a government which contained the discredited P. N. Durnovo as Minister
of the Interior.
In his desperate efforts to restore order Witte wavered between concilia-
tion and repression, with increasing emphasis upon the latter as it became
practicable. The Soviet soon alienated its middle-class sympathisers by
its extremism. Its leaders developed an exaggerated idea of their power,
and impetuously challenged the government before making sure of sup-
port from the peasants or armed forces. Durnovo, seizing his chance,
provoked a conflict by arresting the Soviet’s president (26 November) ; a
week later the entire membership followed him into imprisonment. A final
call for another general strike evoked little response in St Petersburg, but
in Moscow led to a struggle between several hundred partisans, with some
popular support, and loyal troops. By the end of 1905 the government’s
position was greatly strengthened. Punitive expeditions toured the
country wreaking vengeance upon those suspected of revolutionary
activity.
But every success in the struggle against revolution weakened Witte’s
own position vis-a-vis the extremists of the right. Amongst his numerous
enemies at court none was more dangerous than the tsar himself.
Nicholas blamed Witte for the October Manifesto, which he now deeply
regretted and sought to retract. To counterbalance Witte’s influence he
leaned for support upon various reactionary groups, amongst them the
notorious ultra-nationalistic ‘Russian People’s League’, which organised
acts of violence against opponents of autocracy. By a tragic paradox, the
constitutional era dawned amidst widespread pogroms , in which highly
placed persons were sometimes directly implicated. Nicholas willingly
overlooked such unlawful acts, which had his personal sympathy.
In these circumstances Witte felt obliged to make concessions to the
right. Whilst the elections to the Duma were allowed to proceed without
interference, several edicts were issued restricting the assembly’s powers.
The assent of the state council, now expanded to include an elective ele-
ment, and of the Sovereign were necessary for its proposals to become
law, and its rights of budgetary control and legislative initiative were
minimal. Shortly before the Duma met, new Fundamental (that is, con-
stitutional) Laws were promulgated which, in conflict with the spirit if not
the letter of the October Manifesto, stated that the tsar still exercised the
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prerogatives of an autocratic ruler. On the same day (23 April 1906) came
Witte’s dismissal, which ended his public career. Having set out to
establish the conditions for a constitutional regime, he had merely suc-
ceeded in facilitating a restoration of absolutism, disguised by a mock
legislature. His last act as Premier had been to assist in negotiating the
largest loan to date in the history of international finance, which enabled
the government to face the Duma from a position of strength.
This augured ill for the future of Russia’s parliamentary experiment.
The first Duma (27 April-9 July 1906) expressed faithfully the popular
mood of frustrated indignation. Nearly half the deputies were peasants,
for the government, in drafting the electoral law, had provided for their
generous representation in the belief that they would constitute a modera-
ting force. In the event most of them followed, or stood to the left of, the
Kadets, the strongest and most influential party. The Kadets sought to
realise through the Duma the objectives which revolutionary violence had
failed to achieve. The government, on the other hand, envisaged the Duma
as a subservient consultative body. The inevitable clash came on 13 May
when Goremykin, the new Premier, rejected the Duma’s statement of its
legislative intentions, in particular the idea of compulsory expropriation
of private estates where necessary to assuage land-hunger. Subsequently
the deputies occupied themselves with drafting laws which stood little
chance of acceptance, and debating the agrarian question, hoping that
their deliberations, backed by a new wave of peasant disturbances, would
force the administration to yield. Some members of the government were
sufficiently alarmed by the situation in the country to favour conceding
the Duma’s demand for a responsible ministry. Exploratory talks were
held privately with Kadet leaders, but were rendered nugatory by
Nicholas’ refusal to countenance any surrender of his autocratic power.
He sympathised with those ministers who feared the Duma as a source of
dangerous agitation. The assembly was provoked into exceeding its lawful
rights, and dissolution speedily followed. The opposition leaders met in
Vyborg, Finland, and called for a national campaign of passive resistance.
But their appeal went unheeded: such scattered outbreaks as occurred
showed that the peasants and workers had little zeal left for revolution,
and were in any case not disposed to rebel over a constitutional issue they
barely comprehended.
The government was now led by P. A. Stolypin, an energetic and strong-
willed ex-governor, who set out to pacify the country by ruthless repres-
sion coupled with measures of agrarian reform. In August 1906 he
established field courts-martial which within eight months had claimed
over 1700 victims. For Stolypin the interests of the state took precedence
over legal proprieties. During this crucial period he ruled Russia by
decree without due constitutional authority. Though not averse to col-
laborating with the Duma, he considered it justifiable to exert pressure
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during the elections in an effort to manufacture an assembly of acceptable
political colouring.
These dubious methods, however, only resulted in the second Duma
(20 February-3 June 1907) proving even more intractable than the first.
It contained a strong left wing, with no less than sixty-five social-
democratic deputies, as well as a small but vocal group of right-wing
extremists. The Kadets, though much reduced in strength, tried desperately
to avoid another dissolution by keeping strictly within the law, but their
caution merely infuriated the left, which adhered unrealistically to revolu-
tionary slogans rendered obsolete by the course of events. Stolypin
skilfully exploited this mutual bickering, but was unable to persuade the
Duma to endorse his legislative programme, and in particular his agra-
rian policy. Nor would the deputies make the unequivocal repudiation of
terrorism which he required in order to counter pressure by reactionary
groups for dissolution. Once convinced that collaboration with the
assembly was impossible, Stolypin presented it with evidence implicating
the social-democratic members in subversive activity, and demanded
their surrender to stand trial. When the Duma temporised, the order was
issued for dissolution (3 June 1907). It was accompanied by a new electoral
law radically altering the franchise in favour of the propertied classes. With
this virtual coup d'etat the first Russian revolution was brought to an end.
To all external appearances, autocracy had triumphed. Active resistance
had been crushed, and the instruments of coercion were again firmly in
the government’s hands. But the real criterion of its success was the degree
to which it could relieve the acute social and political tensions from which
the revolution had sprung.
In the social sphere the position varied significantly in town and country.
The urban workers gained little from the revolution except a taste for the
heady wine of power. For some groups the 1900’s brought higher wages,
but the improvement in living-standards was nowhere very marked.
Although trade unions were now legally permissible, most of the numerous
organisations that had mushroomed into existence during the revolution
were suppressed as subversive. Russia could not develop a stable mass
labour movement on the western European pattern. The rapidly ex-
panding urban proletariat now relapsed into sullen passivity, but remained
a highly volatile force, easily agitated in time of crisis.
But in the villages a serious effort was at last made to grapple with the
agrarian problem. The revolution had shattered the myth of the sup-
posedly conservative influence exerted by the commune. Stolypin’s
decree of 9 November 1906 allowed peasants to leave the commune and
consolidate their holdings as individual property. Siberian migration was
promoted more energetically, and much crown and state land was trans-
ferred to the Peasant Land Bank for sale to its clients. Stolypin sought to
mitigate land-hunger by all means short of sanctioning expropriation of
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the gentry’s estates, and to create the class of individualistic peasant
proprietors, with a firm stake in the existing social order, which Russia
had hitherto so conspicuously lacked. It is no exaggeration to say that
Russia’s whole future depended upon the extent to which his policy would
succeed in assuaging peasant grievances before the next revolutionary
crisis broke.
Little progress was made in relieving tensions in the political sphere.
One decreasingly important source of discontent was eased by the greater
degree of religious toleration granted in April 1905. Some of the national
minorities improved their position. In Finland, where events had followed
much the same pattern as elsewhere in Russia, repressive legislation had
been revoked, and civil liberties and a democratic constitution granted.
But the new parliament, in which the Social Democrats formed the largest
party, was naturally regarded with suspicion by the imperial government,
which did not consider itself bound by the concessions it had made. In
Transcaucasia a more liberal line was pursued. But the Letts and the
Poles, who had been the most active in the revolutionary struggle, won no
concessions. Everywhere the crisis stimulated nationalist sentiment — not
least among the Russians themselves. Stolypin’s new electoral law, which
decreased the minorities’ representation in the Duma, was a harbinger of
renewed efforts at russification.
Still more important was the continued tension arising from the lack of
assured civil and political rights. The scope of such liberties as existed on
paper was determined in practice by the whims of officialdom. Although
Stolypin’s regime was not the unrelieved tyranny it was often made out
to be by contemporary critics, conditions were oppressive enough to
keep most educated people in opposition to the government. For liberal
public opinion the Duma, even in truncated form, remained the symbol
of their aspirations. It constituted, they believed, a breach in the fortress
of autocracy which could subsequently be widened further until Russia
became a modern democratic state.
It is clear in retrospect that these hopes of progress along Western lines
were exaggerated. In reality the semi- or quasi-constitutional regime
which emerged in 1906 rested upon a very insecure basis. There was an
underlying contradiction in the fact that the Duma and the other rights
cherished by the liberals had not been won through their own efforts, but
through pressure exerted by millions to whom these gains meant very
little. The peasants valued the Duma chiefly as an instrument for ob-
taining the land which they coveted. The workers, who spoke so freely of
democracy, interpreted it in the sense of economic levelling. Relatively
few outside the educated minority had any strong abiding interest in
political liberty or individual rights as such. The mass movement, to
which Russian liberalism was indebted for its successes, also contained a
distinctly illiberal streak.
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When put to the test, it might be said, most Russians were prepared to
subordinate liberty to the aim of social and economic progress. Witte was
right in seeing that a dynamic progressive authoritarian regime would be
appropriate to Russian conditions, but wrong in thinking that the
initiative in this direction might be taken by the monarchy. The imperial
dynasty was too firmly wedded to the interests of the social elite to be
able to effect a radical transformation of the structure of power. Had
Nicholas II been another Peter the Great it is perhaps conceivable that
Witte’s ideas might have borne more fruit — but here one enters the realm
of hypothesis. The Russian right wing, hamstrung by class-consciousness
and loyalty to the traditional conception of autocracy, showed itself
deficient in original thought. Instead, Witte’s design was to be realised
from the left, in a manner and on a scale which would have far surpassed
his imagination. The revolution of 1905 proved to be merely the prelude
to a still greater cataclysm which was to sweep away the heritage of
nineteenth-century Russia and open up new perspectives of intoxicating
and intimidating grandeur.
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CHAPTER XIV
GREAT BRITAIN
AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
at the half-way mark of the Victorian era Britain held an undisputed
L\ position as the greatest power in the world. Her economic, political
1 Vand social institutions rested on firm foundations, and served as
models for old and new states both in Europe and overseas. The empire
controlled by Britain included large areas in Africa, America, Asia, and
Australasia; British sea-power dominated the oceans; British trade
spanned the globe; and Britain had long been recognised as the financial
and industrial centre of the world. While in some particulars this picture
changed before the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, British influence and
power were still immense, and the British empire of 1901 was vastly larger
and richer than that of 1870.
Throughout the eventful closing decades of the nineteenth century
Britain played a leading part in all aspects of world affairs. She pioneered
in fields of science and technology; she promoted the development of
communications by land and sea and furthered the Europeanisation of
Africa, Asia, and Oceania; her capital and entrepreneurial and technical
skills helped to unlock the resources of far-away lands; her cultural, eco-
nomic, political and social institutions were planted in regions throughout
the world. The period witnessed a large diaspora of British peoples and the
unpremeditated role of Britain as a builder of nations.
In 1870 the leading British statesmen believed that Britain was sated
territorially. But in the next thirty years Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph
Chamberlain urged expansion of the empire. Both were converts to this
cause. In the 1860’s Disraeli had advised abandoning British outposts in
West Africa; in the early 1880’s Chamberlain had fought imperialism.
That many other Britons changed their views may be seen by comparing
the results of the general elections of 1880 and 1900. In the former an
overwhelming majority repudiated the romantic imperialism of Lord
Beaconsfield; twenty years later they endorsed the aggressive imperialism
of Chamberlain even though his policy had provoked a costly and dis-
illusioning war in South Africa.
Fast-changing world conditions wrought this revolution in the British
attitude toward the overseas empire. After 1870 the population of most
European countries grew rapidly, and so did their industrialisation.
Living-standards rose; the demand for exotic products waxed; improved
communications made those products more readily available; inter-
national trade expanded ; and a relatively long period of settled internal
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conditions turned the attention of European powers to the acquisition and
exploitation of African and Asian lands. Russia relentlessly pushed for-
ward her imperial frontiers ; France nervously sought to recover by overseas
ventures the prestige and self-confidence lost by her war of 1870-1;
Germany and Italy energetically entered the competition for colonies and
for an increased share of international trade.
Aware of economic opportunities in Africa and Asia and aroused by
the appearance of foreign rivals, British industrialists and traders clam-
oured for a resolute imperial policy. In the 1870’s British investors lost
heavily when Egypt, Turkey and several Central and South American
states defaulted. They then wanted new fields for investment, and de-
manded that their government should widen the imperial orbit. Finding
both Conservative and Liberal governments reluctant to move frontier
posts forward, private empire-builders resurrected an old device for
overseas enterprise— the chartered company. In the 1880’s four such
companies were authorised to operate in Borneo and Africa. Though
theoretically under close government supervision these companies actually
had a free hand in dealing with native rulers. When their activities clashed
with those of other Europeans, the British government was forced to step
in since powerful economic interests as well as strong humanitarian senti-
ment were readily mobilised in support of claims by British subjects.
In Africa especially, God and Mammon co-operated closely in the
expansion of British imperial responsibilities. Early in the nineteenth
century, when Britain brought to an end first the Atlantic slave trade and
then slavery within her empire, abolitionists headed by Sir Thomas
Fowell Buxton sponsored a movement to uproot the slave trade and
slavery within Africa by developing trade in material instead of human
resources of the continent. This plan received immediate support from the
missionary societies. The greatest friend of the African natives. Dr David
Livingstone, upon seeing the horrible results of the ravages of Arab slave
traders, declared that the cure for the ills of Africa was to be found in
4 Christianity and commerce ’. The prescription of this sincere servant of
the 4 Man from Galilee ’ was accepted wholeheartedly by both Christian
humanitarians and business promoters.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century British missionary
organisations worked zealously among African natives. They were especi-
ally active in East Africa where successes in Uganda encouraged the belief
that here was a vast field ready for harvest. The Arab slave-hunters were,
of course, implacably hostile to the Christian missionaries who sought
alliance with European and especially British traders. Aid was finally
obtained from the British government. With the occupation of Zanzibar
the depredations of the Arabs were checked. Although profit was the
primary objective of the British trading companies, the most active of
their agents, Sir Harry Johnston and Frederick, Lord Lugard, were ardent
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humanitarians. The termination of the slave trade brought sorely needed
relief to suffering Africans.
In Oceania also British humanitarianism was a potent factor in shaping
British policy. As cotton and sugar plantations were established in Fiji
and Queensland, labour shortages were relieved by recruiting Polynesians
under an indenture system. Unscrupulous European, American, and
Australasian traders often kidnapped natives whose status on the planta-
tions became little different from that of slaves. After some hesitation the
British parliament passed the Pacific Islander Protection Act, annexed the
Fiji Islands, and created the office of High Commissioner for the Western
Pacific. With the increase of German trading activities in this region the
Australasian colonies persistently urged further British annexations, but
not until Germany had seized north-eastern New Guinea and adjoining
islands did Britain occupy south-eastern New Guinea.
While colonial pressure for new British annexations was frequently
ignored, the need to safeguard trade routes and existing imperial bound-
aries often brought aggressive action. This was especially true after the
Suez Canal had proved to be an important high road for British trade with
the East. Soon Britain became deeply involved in the eastern Medi-
terranean, in Egypt and eastern Africa, and in the Red Sea region.
Concern for the safety of India resulted in the annexation of Baluchistan
and the remainder of Burma, and the extension of British influence in
Persian Gulf lands and Malaya.
In the international scramble for African possessions, Britain carried
off many valuable prizes. Here the Imperial East Africa Company, the
Royal Niger Company, and the South Africa Chartered Company were
the chief instruments for expansion. Though conferences and bilateral
agreements between interested powers accomplished the partition of
Africa without international conflict, in some areas natives offered stout
resistance — the Ashantees on the Gold Coast, the Kaffirs, Matabele and
Zulu in South Africa, and the fanatical Mohammedan dervishes in the
Sudan. But it was the European republics in South Africa which most
resolutely resisted British annexation. Gold discoveries within the Trans-
vaal brought British adventurers and capital into this country whose
western boundary abutted on the relatively narrow strip of habitable land
connecting the Cape Colony with Rhodesia. Friction between the
foreigners and the burghers in the Transvaal, British fear for the safety of
the Missionary Road to the interior and of a coalition between the
Transvaal and Germany, and the unwillingness of Transvaalers to treat
the Britons as equals resulted in the greatest British colonial war since
the American Revolution. The heroic Boers repeatedly defeated superior
British forces. Though their land was annexed in 1900, not until 31 May
1902 did the uneven conflict come to an end with the surrender of the last
Boer forces in the field.
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As the long reign of Queen Victoria closed in January 1901 there was
much activity on the periphery of her empire. In South Africa the war was
still on; in Malaya and in Nigeria British rule was gradually being estab-
lished and consolidated; in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan British officials
were bringing order and security to a much plundered country; in India a
masterful viceroy. Lord Curzon, endeavoured to improve the condition of
her vast population and to make her safe against foreign attacks ; in the
Far East British emissaries cast about for means to protect valuable
British economic interests. At home Joseph Chamberlain strove to rescue
the West Indian colonies from ruin, and to promote economic develop-
ment and welfare in British dependencies.
The dynamics of imperial expansion were matched by shrewd steadi-
ness of management and constant readaptation in new as well as old units
of the overseas empire. The chief objectives of the British government
were to establish the framework of an ordered society wherein cannibalism,
human sacrifice, and slavery would cease, to provide security for life and
property, and to ensure essential conditions for private enterprise, profit
for investors, and employment for the native population. The system of
indirect rule prevailing in the princely states of India was extended to the
Fiji Islands, to Malaya, and to large sections of Africa. Under this system
native chiefs continued to enjoy their former prestige and privileges while,
except for laws relating to crime, native customs were undisturbed. Many
of the areas so controlled were labelled protectorates or protected states,
and their inhabitants were not British subjects. In Egypt Britain ruled
(subject to many international restrictions) through an agent and consul-
general at Cairo. From 1883 until 1907 the able and energetic Evelyn
Baring, Earl of Cromer, held this dual post. Theoretically the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan was governed by Britain and Egypt under an arrangement
called a condominium — actually Britain was the dominant partner.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century the British colonies of North
America and Australasia had enjoyed self-government. Later this boon
was extended to the South African colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and
Natal. Efforts to unite colonies into regional federations were vigorously
supported by the imperial authorities; they met with success in North
America and Australia but failed in South Africa and the West Indies. As
no definite limits of autonomy had been prescribed for self-governing
colonies, they won by degrees the attributes of sovereign states. The
imperial government scrupulously refrained from meddling in their
internal affairs, even in cases where actions were deemed unwise, as in New
Zealand’s confiscation of Maori land in 1 880-1 and Newfoundland’s sale
of public utilities to a private firm in 1897. Colonial immigration Acts
which discriminated against non-European British subjects and citizens of
friendly Asian countries evoked protests from Downing Street, but in the
end the colonies had their way. British economic interests resented
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colonial protective customs duties but to no avail. Before the century
closed colonial fiscal autonomy was an established fact; self-governing
colonies could not, without their consent, be bound by British commercial
treaties, and in 1893 Canada created a precedent by negotiating com-
mercial agreements directly with France.
While the colonies, free to pursue their own interests, neither paid
tribute to Britain nor had any other obligations to the imperial centre,
they profited by their membership in the British empire. They were pro-
tected against foreign foes ; they were served by the British consular and
diplomatic representatives; they were a favoured field for British invest-
ments; and they could borrow on advantageous terms in the London
money market.
In general, Britain conducted intra-imperial relations on the basis of
‘freedom and voluntaryism’. Not until 1895, when Joseph Chamberlain
became Colonial Secretary, was laissez-faire replaced by a purposeful,
constructive imperial policy at government level. A resourceful admini-
strator, Chamberlain looked upon the overseas empire as an under-
developed estate. He recognised that Britain had definite obligations
toward her dependencies and that therefore — as John Morley wrote of
him — she should justify her rule ‘by bringing security, peace, and com-
parative prosperity to lands that never knew them before’. His develop-
ment and welfare programme was tied in with efforts to bind the colonies
more closely to Britain and to extend imperial boundaries. These efforts
failed, as did all the efforts of imperial enthusiasts to federate the empire,
because conflicting economic and political interests of Great and Greater
Britain could not be reconciled. But if consolidation was rejected by the
self-governing colonies, a common allegiance to the Crown and periodic
consultative colonial conferences still linked Great and Greater Britain.
Although the leading colonies had legislative autonomy, their laws were
not permitted to conflict with British laws, and the Judicial Committee of
the British Privy Council was the supreme court for all overseas sections
of the British empire.
The British political scene was dominated by two giants, Benjamin
Disraeli (later Earl of Beaconsfield) and W. E. Gladstone. As in the case
of Pitt and Fox the leaders aroused either devoted attachment or bitter
hostility. Interest in politics was keen; parliament enjoyed immense
prestige; the House of Commons attracted men of ability and character;
reports of debates were widely read; and the dramatic duel between
Gladstone and Disraeli lent an heroic quality to party warfare. Although
diametrically opposite in outlook and temperament the two leaders were
well matched. Gladstone, Prime Minister since 1868, was at the height of
his power as administrator and parliamentarian. A brilliant orator, he was
also an eager crusader for moral causes. He was intent upon righting the
wrongs of Ireland and liberalising British institutions. His government
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inaugurated a tax-supported elementary school system, opened the civil
service to men of talent, ended the purchase of army commissions,
provided protection for trade union funds, reorganised the English
judiciary system and extended government control to the relations between
Irish landlords and tenants. As the head of a strong government, supported
by a large Liberal majority in the House of Commons, Gladstone made
the period of his first ministry, 1868-74, extremely important in the
annals of reform legislation.
Facing Gladstone was Benjamin Disraeli, undisputed chief of the
Conservatives. Cool, detached, sceptical, an effective debater, he was
extraordinarily adroit both as strategist and tactician. He had overcome
tremendous obstacles, and had educated his party to accept reforms.
Although admired by many he was trusted by few — among the latter was
the Queen whom he completely captivated. More than any other of her
Prime Ministers Disraeli appreciated the need for social reform, and as
Prime Minister, 1874-80, he supported legislation dealing with labour
conditions and trade unions, housing, the enclosure of commons, and
merchant shipping. But imaginative and romantic, fascinated by the
glitter and pomp of monarchy, Disraeli stressed imperial issues above all
others. He had the Queen proclaimed Empress of India, purchased
nine-twentieths of the shares of the Suez Canal Company, sanctioned
imperial expansion in Africa and Asia, and held the centre of the stage at
the Congress of Berlin, 1878.
On the domestic political scene, Irish problems aroused fierce and
prolonged conflict. Gladstone sought to pacify Ireland by disestablishing
and disendowing the Anglican Church in the island, by improving the lot
of the Irish peasants, and finally, in his third administration, 1886, by
giving Ireland a separate parliament. This programme threatened privi-
leges warmly defended by the Conservatives, but not until Gladstone
proposed Irish Home Rule were the British voters really aroused. By
representing home rule as a measure which would imperil the United
Kingdom and establish ‘Rome rule’ in Ireland, opponents revived
English antagonisms and fears. In vain Gladstone pleaded that the self-
determination which Britain had advocated for European national
entities and conceded to her own overseas colonies should be granted to
Ireland as a right and a means for bringing peace to the island and a
union of hearts in the British Isles. The issue split his own party, old
friends and associates deserted him, and he was reviled in unmeasured
terms. In addition to causing a deep cleavage in British politics and
society the Irish Home Rule question impeded the progress of economic
and social reform. It damaged Britain’s relations with Australia, Canada,
and especially with the United States where Irish immigrants nourished in
their hearts bitter hostility to England, implanted it in their children, and
injected it into American politics.
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With the death of Lord Beaconsfield in 1881 and the retirement of
Gladstone thirteen years later, the political stage lost its greatest per-
formers. Lord Salisbury, leader of the Conservatives at the close of the
century, had the support of a large parliamentary majority and enjoyed
the confidence of the Queen. But Salisbury, competent in handling
foreign relations, neglected pressing social problems. The decade of the
i88o’s saw the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of the brilliant Lord
Randolph Churchill, and the remarkable success and final ruin of the
skilful but ruthless Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. In the 1870’s
Joseph Chamberlain won national recognition as a champion of social
reform; in the latter half of the 1880’s he stood forth as the implacable foe
of Irish Home Rule; after 1895 he emerged as the outstanding member of
the Salisbury government and as the most ardent and resolute of British
imperialists.
In the overseas countries statesmen operated in the restricted field of
small democratic societies. Here the transplanted British institutions had
to be adjusted to frontier conditions. Though rich in natural resources, all
colonies suffered from shortages of capital and manpower, and their
leaders faced problems fundamentally different from those in the United
Kingdom. The largest among the budding nations of Greater Britain
was the Dominion of Canada whose constitutional framework was
modelled in part after that of the United States, but whose operating
institutions — the monarchy, parliamentary government, and law courts—
had come from Britain. Here the Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald
successfully guided a vast and thinly populated country through its diffi-
cult formative period. It was his political opponent, the Liberal Sir
Wilfrid Laurier, who at the close of the century became Macdonald’s
successor as a Canadian nation builder. Laurier was proud of his French
blood, but like Macdonald he was loyal to Canada’s British connection
and dedicated to her upbuilding as a British nation. His advent to the
premiership in 1896 marked the beginning of a long period of unparalleled
progress; Laurier optimistically proclaimed that the twentieth would be
Canada’s century.
Among the other self-governing British colonies only New Zealand
produced leaders whose achievements entitle them to be listed with
Macdonald and Laurier as nation builders. In the 1870’s Julius (later
Sir Julius) Vogel, an immigrant of German-Jewish origin, led New
Zealand out of the deep depression which had followed a series of native
wars. He promoted public works, attracted capital and immigrants, and
changed the colony from a loose federation of provinces into a well-knit
unitary state. Twenty years later New Zealand-born William Pember
Reeves spearheaded a series of reforms which focused world attention on
the tiny democracy in the South Sea as a laboratory for economic and
social experiments. Basic factors in New Zealand’s progress were the
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protection and the capital, manpower, and technical skills which the
mother-country provided.
Common to Great and Greater Britain in the latter part of the Victorian
era was a steady advance toward political democracy. At home the tradi-
tional outline of the national government remained unaltered, but details
of its organisation were materially changed. The reform bill of 1867 gave
the vote to labourers in the towns, that of 1 884 extended the same boon
to rural areas. Moreover, the redistribution of seats in the House of
Commons which accompanied these measures put representation more
squarely on a population basis. The Ballot Act of 1872 reduced the
opportunities to intimidate voters while a later corrupt practices Act
diminished the influence of money power in general elections.
But in the advance toward political democracy Britain trailed behind
the self-governing colonies. Led by Australia (South Australia in 1 855 ;
Victoria in 1857; New South Wales in 1858) they had early adopted
universal manhood suffrage, and by 1901 New Zealand and South
Australia had granted the vote to women also. Furthermore, ‘ one man
one vote ’ was the general rule in the colonies. In Britain, on the other hand,
the Reform Act of 1884 still denied the vote to sons living at home and to
servants— that is to approximately 15-20 per cent of the adult male
population — while men in business or with residences in several districts
might meet the electoral requirements in each place and thus have several
votes. The possibility for plural voting was increased by the fact that not
all constituencies were polled on the same day. While the number of
plural voters was relatively small they sometimes decided the outcome in
close contests, and since they generally belonged to the upper classes, the
arrangement favoured the Conservative party. The custom of not paying
members of the British House of Commons had a similar effect. The more
democratic colonial societies paid salaries to their legislators. However,
the chief difference between the legislative machinery of Great and
Greater Britain was in the second chamber. At home the House of Lords
with its majority of hereditary peers continued to wield much power.
Proposals to ‘mend or end’ that house aroused little public interest even
though the Conservatives held such an overwhelming majority that it had
become almost a one-party chamber. Overseas the members of the
second chambers were either appointed or elected. Both in Great Britain
and in the colonies, however, changes in legislative practice or in the
method of selection weakened their power and compelled them to heed
public opinion.
A series of reforms advanced democracy in Britain on the local level.
School boards set up by the Education Act of 1 870 were chosen by elec-
tions in which women could vote. In 1 888 the Conservatives under Lord
Salisbury ended the old system of county government by justices of the
peace in quarter-sessions, replacing it with elective councils. Six years
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later this democratisation was continued by the Liberals with the intro-
duction of elected parish and district councils. But reforms in Ireland
lagged behind those for Great Britain, and not until 1898 was the elective
principle introduced in the local government of ‘John Bull’s other island’.
The English system of county government had not been transplanted to
the principal overseas colonies. Australasia, Canada and South Africa
handled local affairs in various ways with the general pattern following
distinctly democratic lines.
Robert Lowe, the famous opponent of electoral reform in Britain, is
quoted as saying after the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, ‘Now we must
educate our masters’. This sentiment furthered the adoption of free, com-
pulsory elementary education in Great Britain, and a type of political
education for adults spread rapidly after the labouring classes had been
enfranchised. Because the aristocratic political clubs in London could not
hope to manipulate the votes of the masses, new devices were invented by
both parties. Starting with small local units and ending with powerful
national organisations they gave the voters the opportunity to choose
party managers who directed political strategy. Joseph Chamberlain
‘insisted’, to quote Morley again, that ‘democracy to be strong must be
concentrated ; its force would be wasted unless units organised themselves
for electoral purposes in free, open, representative, local associations with
freely chosen and recognised leaders’. Gladstone blessed the change at
the outset but Lord Randolph Churchill, who sponsored it among the
Conservatives, had difficulty in gaining Salisbury’s consent. The interest
of the masses was aroused, and the borders of the political community
were widened by the new type of party organisation. The increase of party
cohesion and discipline made the whip more important than formerly, and
the road was cleared for the subsequent appearance of the party boss.
Charles Stewart Parnell had already achieved that position when for several
years up to 1890 he held absolute control over the Irish Nationalist party.
Although British women were denied the right to vote in national elec-
tions, they were enlisted as unpaid party workers after the Corrupt
Practices Act of 1883 had outlawed the employment of paid canvassers.
The Primrose League served the Conservative party without reward, but
the Women’s Liberal Federation demanded that candidates whom they
helped should support women’s suffrage. They had little success. The
women of New Zealand and South Australia obtained the franchise a
quarter of a century earlier than their British sisters.
Mass political education took a long step forward in November 1879,
when Gladstone opened his famous campaign in the Midlothian county
of Scotland. In a series of great speeches to huge audiences he analysed
contemporary issues and charged the Conservative government with
moral laxity in domestic and foreign affairs. Masterfully he exposed its
mistakes, fervently he appealed to the voters’ sense of justice and fair play.
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That a former first minister of the Crown should discuss matters of high
politics at mass meetings scandalised the Queen; Beaconsfield sneered at
his rival’s ‘drenching rhetoric’; but voters liked to be addressed as people
endowed with reason. They returned Gladstone to office and power;
henceforth his method of popular appeal became common practice in
British political campaigns — a practice which had been applied in the
colonies long before Gladstone started his Midlothian crusade.
Accustomed to guidance by their ‘betters’ the British labouring classes
were slow to use for their own advantage the powers conferred upon them
by the reform bills. Despite the fact that many captains of industry and
merchant princes supported the Liberals, and Gladstone himself was a
staunch individualist, the masses had faith in him and his party. To them
the Liberals represented progress and Gladstone stood for righteousness.
He became ‘the People’s William’; his efforts to increase social opportu-
nities and his ethical standards had powerful appeal to Bible-reading
labourers. Disraeli, who saw the need for attracting the labour vote, coined
the slogan ‘the Monarchy and the Multitude’ — the government should be
paternalistic. His Home Secretary, 1874-80, R. A. (later Lord) Cross,
with the assistance of the Prime Minister, passed several social reform
measures. After the death of Beaconsfield Tory Democracy was upheld by
Lord Randolph Churchill. But the rank and file of labour suspected the
Conservative party, where ‘the solid phalanx of the great families’ re-
mained influential and solicitude for the privileges of the landed interests
and the Church continued strong. Because the two-party tradition domi-
nated politics, labour leaders gained benefits for their class by boring from
within.
In the 1880’s two new remedies for economic ills were offered to the
British public — Marxian socialism and Henry George’s single tax. While
some middle-class intellectuals accepted Marxism, labour at home and
overseas distrusted both nostrums. But in the late 1890’s they were
attracted by proposals for independent political action. Times had been
hard. Workers refused to believe that they were ‘born only to endure’.
They still found consolation in religion and might troop to labour
meetings in Methodist chapels singing
O God our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
but heavenly support seemed to take an unconscionable time in arriving.
In 1894 ‘the People’s William’ retired from politics. A year later Joseph
Chamberlain shelved the cause of social betterment for that of im-
perialism. Salisbury’s detached inactivity held no hope for the under-
privileged. In Australia a young Labour party was gaining strength.
Reluctantly the British Trades Union Congress endorsed a move to-
ward independent political action. As the century closed British labour
took the first step toward the organisation of a national labour party.
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In politics as in the system of government the colonies followed British
models. But in the wilderness the precedents of an old society sometimes
hindered rather than helped. Colonial society was democratic while that
of Britain was still mainly aristocratic in structure. Since the colonies were
not yet sovereign states the development of their natural resources rather
than foreign relations shaped party politics. Only in South Africa was the
problem of foreign relations a serious one, and only there was the exist-
ence of a non-European population a further serious complication.
Canada borrowed her party labels from Britain. Macdonald, the
Conservative, studied the political ideas of Disraeli; Laurier, the Liberal,
drew inspiration from Gladstone. But the party alignments in the new
federation came closer to American than British models. Issues such as
protective tariff and provincial rights had counterparts south of the inter-
national boundary, not in the United Kingdom. In Australia, too, the
tariff was much discussed and that question delayed federation. In one
form or another, land and labour were perennial themes for political
platforms overseas. Canada adopted the American plan of free land
grants of moderate size to bona fide settlers, but in Australasia immense
areas of the public land had passed into the hands of individual owners or
occupiers early in the period of settlement so that repossession by the
Crown or the breaking up of the large holdings were live political cam-
paign topics. All self-governing colonies needed labourers but this need
varied according to the ebb and flow of economic prosperity— therefore
subsidising immigration occasioned endless debate. Then there was
the question of who should be admitted. Railway builders in western
Canada and in East Africa brought in coolies from China and India;
plantation owners in Fiji, Natal, Queensland, and the West Indies
recruited under indenture labourers from India and Polynesia. In self-
governing colonies these practices caused stormy debates, for resident
labourers feared that an influx of Asians would depress living-standards.
In British Columbia and in Australasia the exclusion of Asians and of
Polynesians aroused intense feeling. No sooner was the Commonwealth
of Australia formed than federal legislation was passed to ensure a white
Australia.
The debate about the exclusion of Asians helped to bring labour into
politics and encouraged the Australian colonies to federate. Uniform
legislation was needed to keep Australia a white-man’s continent. It was
not a sense of racial superiority but the desire to protect their jobs which
made Australian labourers take a resolute stand on the immigration issue.
In the depressed 1890’s labour in New South Wales entered politics as an
independent political party, while in New Zealand labour formed a
Liberal-Labour (Lib-Lab) alliance to promote pro-labour legislation.
Despite these differences of circumstances the colonies generally ac-
cepted British political concepts and methods. French-speaking Canadians
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and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans skilfully used instruments for
government that had been made in Britain. Before the nineteenth century
closed a nationalist movement arose in India; and the goal of the Indian
National Congress, founded in 1 885, was to secure for the ancient races
of the Asian sub-continent self-government on the British model. On
26 January 1901 The Economist, a leading British journal, observed that
‘as a nation we are not greatly loved by the world at large; but it is clear
that our sources of political strength are appreciated ’. Proof cited was the
fact that the British system of government had been widely adopted
throughout the world. Of Queen Victoria, recently demised, this journal
said that she was ‘the only one whom, for the last thirty years of her life,
her millions of subjects, the conquerors and the conquered alike, would
have chosen by plebiscite to occupy the throne’. Neither the leader-
writer nor the public knew that the Queen had vehemently declared in
1 880 that a ruler of a democratic country she would not be. That secret
had been well kept. The country had steadily grown more democratic but
she had not abdicated. Republican voices speaking softly in England in
1871 and raucously in Australia twenty years later were mute in 1901.
Improvements in communication exerted a profound influence on the
course of events in Britain and the empire. Iron and steel replaced wood
in shipbuilding, the new compound steam-engine was vastly more efficient
than its predecessors, and by the end of the century the internal combus-
tion engine promised to revolutionise mechanical propulsion on land and
sea. Britain was the world’s greatest shipbuilder, shipowner, and supplier
of bunker coal. Her position on the sea remained dominant; her mer-
chant marine aided mightily in the spread of British influence and trade
and in maintaining close contacts between the imperial centre and its
far-flung dependencies. Income from freight, brokerage, insurance, ship-
ping and other services reached large proportions, and the introduction
of refrigerator-ships gave a tremendous boost to Australasian dairy
farming.
The great era of railway building was already over in Britain by 1870
but she was an important producer of railway supplies ; her engineers and
technicians enjoyed an excellent reputation; and she had capital available
for railway construction both within and outside her empire. In the years
1870-1901 British enterprise and money united countries with bands of
steel and opened up for exploitation agricultural and mineral resources in
Africa, America, Asia and Australasia. Much of the British capital
exported was in the form of goods needed for building and equipping rail-
ways. The clank of the train rang in the dawn of better days for the dwellers
on the Canadian prairie and in the Australian bush. Only by improved
communications could their toilsome life be made easier and hope blossom
for reward. But with the lowering of transportation costs the production
and marketing of goods became highly competitive. What was a boon for
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cattle raisers, dairymen and wheat farmers abroad spelled ruin for their
counterparts in Britain.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was an event of tremendous
economic and political significance for the British empire. In Britain the
local canals lost out in the competition with the railways ; the only con-
siderable new canal-building venture was the Manchester Ship Canal
which transformed that inland city into a seaport. It was otherwise in
Canada where canals continued to furnish the cheapest transport for wheat
and other bulky products of the interior. Here the waterway from
Montreal to Lake Superior was much improved in the years 1885-1900.
The bicycle and electric tram-car changed conditions for work and play.
But Britain lagged behind continental Europe and the United States in
developing the internal combustion engine. British regulations, which
limited to four miles an hour the speed of mechanically driven vehicles,
delayed the introduction of the motor-car.
It was otherwise with the electric telegraph. State-owned in Britain,
this device revolutionised news service and gave London direct contact
with distant places. Important for business, the telegraph was also signifi-
cant culturally and politically for the British empire. Expatriated Britons
could get news daily and speedily from home. No longer did the imperial
government have to wait for weeks and even months — as in the case of the
Indian Mutiny — for information about events at remote outposts. Neces-
sary aid and directives could be dispatched promptly. Instead of being
the man on the spot with much latitude in handling his problems, the
colonial governor became an official at the end of the wire, receiving his
orders from Downing Street. Though to obey instructions ceased to be
‘an eccentric quality in a governor’, the British empire was not entirely
without strong-minded proconsuls, among whom Lord Curzon, viceroy
of India from 1898 to 1905, was the outstanding example.
The improvements in communications brought trade expansion; new
areas were reached and additional resources tapped. The growth of popu-
lation and the rise in living-standards stimulated the demand for goods.
Ships, bunker coal for foreign vessels, and capital goods, especially
machinery, ranked high among items of British export. The entrepot trade
remained important. British merchants continued to be middlemen for
colonial as well as for a multitude of continental European consumers.
However, many factors worried British industrialists and traders. Al-
though there were fluctuations, price levels dropped after 1873, reaching a
record low level about 1894-5. The 1886 report of the investigations of a
Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade disclosed that Britain had
powerful rivals among whom Germany and the United States were the
most formidable. New as industrialists and international traders, the
nationals of both these countries were unhampered by old traditions.
Energetic and ingenious, they had no hesitancy in adopting the latest
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methods in the making and selling of goods. Unlike British manufacturers,
who found it necessary to weigh the advantages of new plants over old,
they had no such handicap. More adaptable than the British, American
and German salesmen were eager to please customers, and the Germans
were especially aided by flexible credit systems. Both Germany and the
United States, which had extensive natural resources and large domestic
markets, protected new industries with customs tariffs. The dream of
Richard Cobden, that the world generally would adopt free trade, failed
to materialise. Except for New South Wales and the Cape the self-
governing British colonies refused to become free traders. To Canadians
a ‘National Policy’ meant protection for their own industries. Even tiny
Victoria sought to industrialise by means of high import-duties. India
alone among British dependencies had a tax structure arranged for the
benefit of British manufacturers. Though Britain gave no tariff preference
to goods from empire countries, in 1896 Canada began to grant preferen-
tial treatment to some articles of British manufacture.
British industrialists continued to support free trade until the end of the
nineteenth century. A feeble fair-trade movement of the 1880’s failed
miserably. Britain, in order to sell, had to buy goods from abroad.
Because cheap food suited the interests of industrial employers and
employees alike, West Indian planters and British farmers received no aid
in facing pitiless foreign competition. Political changes and the dominant
economic theories were unfavourable to the interests of British and West
Indian agriculture.
A change in favour of the West Indies finally occurred after Chamber-
lain became Colonial Secretary. Realising that British colonial sugar-
producers faced unfair competition from the bounty-supported beet sugar
of continental Europe, he took action with characteristic vigour. By
threatening to impose countervailing duties on bounty-fed sugar he ob-
tained some relief for the depressed West Indies. But later when he took
up tariff reform in earnest, Chamberlain offered no help to British
farmers.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the British landed
interests had lost their once-dominant influence in government, and British
agriculture no longer led the world in the production of low-cost high-
grade produce. New types of wheat from the American fields were
superior in milling quality to the British wheat. Year after year the virgin
soil of the American prairie produced crops without the use of fertiliser.
In England the land had to support three distinct classes — the landowner,
the farmer, and the agricultural labourer. Only about 10-15 per cent of
the land of England and Wales was farmed by owner-occupier. The typical
American wheat farmer had either secured his land free or at a low cost
from government or railway companies. He worked in the fields with his
hired hands, generally newly arrived immigrants from Europe who toiled
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long hours at low wages. They were hired only for the busy season ; during
the rest of the year they might go to the pineries or do the farmer’s chores
for room and board alone. Knowing that they too could soon become
freehold farmers American field hands worked at a tempo unknown in the
old world. Moreover, modern machinery drastically reduced production
costs of American and Canadian wheat. Improved ways of handling the
grain in bulk, and low freight rates, meant cheap food for the British con-
sumer but disaster for the British wheat farmer.
In the i88o’s refrigerated cargo vessels began to transport perishable
goods over long distances. Thenceforth dairy products and chilled or
frozen meat from America and Australasia appeared in increased quanti-
ties at reasonable prices in English markets. In the year 1900 New Zealand
alone sent four million frozen lamb and sheep carcasses to England.
Australasian dairy farmers presently vied with those of Denmark for
control of the English market.
Inventions and scientific discoveries benefited the dairy farmer as they
had the wheat grower. Stock was improved by careful breeding, fodder
and pastures were enriched by suitable fertilisers and grasses, the cream
separator and the milk tester revolutionised milk handling, and butter and
cheese factories were established. The average farmer of the Antipodes
was more progressive than his British confrere who failed to capitalise on
his nearness to the world’s best dairy market.
In the 1870’s nature combined with economic factors to add to the woes
of the British farmer. A series of wet seasons damaged crops while a suc-
cessful labour union movement secured an increase in wages. The steady
fall in prices was ruinous to British agriculture. Wheat prices, 1894-5,
dropped to the lowest level in 150 years. An easing of the local tax burden
and small rent reductions failed to save the situation for the farmers of
England and Wales. Between 1870 and 1901 two and a half million acres
changed from arable to grass, and the number of farm labourers dropped
by about 300,000. While the situation in Scotland approximated to that
of England, in Ireland improvements took place toward the end of the
century. Chiefly for political reasons, the Irish land problem received
much attention. New laws improved the lot of tenant farmers, and large
sums of money on easy credit were made available for those who wished to
become freeholders. A vigorous Irish agricultural reform movement
headed by Sir Horace Plunkett stressed the need for agricultural education,
for dairying, and for co-operatives on the Danish model. Danish experts
were brought in, and by 1900 the outlook was very promising.
English interest in scientific farming revived late in the century. A board
of agriculture was established, a minister of agriculture was appointed,
agricultural education was emphasised, the English Agricultural Society
was founded, and research was subsidised by the government. But
because the average English farmer was intolerant of new ideas results
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were much delayed. Since imported foodstuffs enabled the importing
countries to pay for the purchase of British manufactured goods Britons
saw little need for increased agricultural production.
It was otherwise in the colonies, especially in Australasia, where the
products of the land had to pay for railway supplies, heavy machinery,
and other capital goods. Wool continued to be the mainstay of the eco-
nomy, but in some colonies, notably New Zealand, meat production and
dairying were coming up fast. The North Island of New Zealand, with its
equitable climate and adequate rainfall, had many natural advantages for
dairy farming. These were intelligently exploited by alert agriculturists
who availed themselves of the latest discoveries, established butter and
cheese factories, and took full advantage of lessons learned from Danish
pioneering in agricultural co-operation. After 1891 the New Zealand
government put more farmers on the land, made arrangements for easy
rural credit, and assisted in the grading of dairy produce. The dynamic
force behind this movement was practical experience rather than abstract
theory.
In contrast with the policy at home, the British government actively
sought ways to increase production of primary goods in the dependencies.
For the benefit of the native population as well as that of the imperial
power, special efforts were made to improve economic conditions.
Mining was left to private enterprise but the products of the soil were
fostered by the government. Support was given to cocoa, coffee, cotton,
ground-nuts, sisal, and tea production. The Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew served as headquarters for the entire empire, sending out seeds and
seedlings, giving expert advice, and maintaining contacts with botanical
institutions in Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and the West Indies. Ex-
perimental stations were established to help both planters and peasants.
Hope of profit attracted private capital to the colonies. In Ceylon and
Malaya tea and rubber plantations sprang up, communications were
improved, and trade furthered. Although some of the newer biological
sciences such as genetics and plant pathology were still in their infancy,
the British government tried to extend all known scientific benefits to the
dependencies.
In the great manufacturing industries — iron, steel, and textiles — Britain
had long dominated. But as she spread the industrial revolution by im-
proving communications and exporting capital, machines, scientific ideas,
and technological skill her pre-eminence waned and rivals challenged her
leadership. This was particularly true in the iron and steel industries. In
1880 the British export was twice that of France, Germany and the United
States combined. But during the following decade British iron and steel
production stagnated. In Germany and the United States ironmasters
applied British inventions and discoveries — which had been ignored by
conservative British industrial magnates — and output mounted. British
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ironmasters, loath to scrap old machines and plants, lost out in competi-
tion with foreign rivals who started from scratch. Moreover, Germany
and the United States had immense deposits of coal and rich iron ore, and
their domestic markets were protected by tariffs. Consequently, before
1900 both the United States and Germany had forged ahead of the United
Kingdom in steel production.
Despite sharp competition, the British textile manufacturers held their
own. Most of the raw cotton still came from the United States ; Austra-
lasia supplied vast quantities of excellent wool. Lancashire, centre of
British cotton industry, had much political influence, and when a growing
cotton industry in India threatened that very important market the cotton
manufacturers of Lancashire became ardent crusaders for humanitarian
Indian factory laws ; they also succeeded in having an excise duty imposed
on Indian cotton manufactures which matched the revenue duty levied
on imported cotton goods.
The conservatism which had deterred British ironmasters from capital-
ising on new British ideas in steelmaking also hindered the growth of
British chemical industries. The British discovery that dyes could be pro-
duced from coal-tar was not appreciated in Britain as quickly as in
Germany. A powerful German industry sprang up whose aniline dyes
soon drove vegetable dyes from the world market. Since some of the
latter were products of the West Indian logwood, the new industry added
to the troubles of the distressed British West Indies.
While some British industries had suffered setbacks by 1901, in finance
as in shipping Britain continued to hold undisputed first place. The pound
sterling based on gold remained the most stable of world currencies, and
the Bank of England, ‘ the Gibraltar ’ of the financial world, acted as the
reserve bank for the British empire. By amalgamation and the growth of
branch banking, five English joint-stock banks acquired tremendous
power. Although jolted by the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1879
and the collapse of the Barings eleven years later, the British banking
system survived strains which caused ruin in other countries ; it provided
the security necessary for healthy financial operations. Conscious of their
responsibility to depositors and investors, the English joint-stock banks
were cautious in granting credit and hesitant to operate outside England —
of the five only Barclays Bank had overseas subsidiaries. With self-
government, imperial control over colonial banks vanished. They wel-
comed deposits but resented supervision from London where the leading
colonial banks still kept reserves. Some banks chartered overseas and
established with British capital had their headquarters in London, the
centre of commercial, insurance, mining, shipping and other companies
whose operations were world-wide. In fact, ‘ the City ’ was the capital of a
financial domain far more extensive than the British empire.
Chancellors of the Exchequer, Conservative as well as Liberal, followed
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the principles laid down by Sir Robert Peel and W. E. Gladstone — they
were ‘trusted and confidential’ stewards of the people ‘under a sacred
obligation’ with regard to public expenditures. As a result taxation was
light, the national debt declined from £747 mill ions in 1870 to £635
millions in 1899, and the interest rate was reduced from 3 to i\ per cent.
Thus more money for business ventures became available, and much of it
went to the empire. Despite some heavy losses, long-term British foreign
investments rose from one to z\ billion pounds in the period 1870-1900,
about one-half of which was invested within the British empire. The profit
from these investments, added to the earnings for banking, insurance and
shipping services, helped to balance Britain’s foreign trade account and
contributed materially to the national income.
Financially all dependencies were debtors and all reaped great benefits
from their British connections. Colonial loans Acts supplied funds at very
low interest rates for public works and relief in African and West Indian
dependencies. Since British political control provided assurance of
stability the Indian and colonial governments could borrow cheaply in
London for harbour and irrigation works, railways, telegraph and tele-
phone construction. In this connection the Colonial Stocks Act, 1900,
which made it possible to invest trust funds in colonial securities, con-
ferred substantial benefits on borrowers. Moreover, political security
encouraged British investors and business promoters to start industrial
developments in many parts of the empire, including India.
The capital outflow generally took the form of sale of capital goods,
investment in overseas enterprise, government or private loans, and bank
deposits. Irrigation works in India, railways in India and elsewhere,
docks, harbours, and public utilities were made possible because money
could be obtained cheaply in London; Chamberlain’s Colonial Stocks
Act was particularly helpful in this respect. Private venture capital went
into the chartered companies already mentioned, the establishment of
colonial plantations, the exploitation of forests, the opening of mines and
other enterprises which promised profit. At the close of the 1880’s a good
deal of British money was deposited in Australian banks. This proved
unfortunate, for the large deposits encouraged speculation and, when the
failure of the Barings tightened the London money market, Australian
banks discovered the folly of lending long and borrowing short. Deposits
were withdrawn and banks were forced to close.
In the financial crises of the early 1 890’s governments within the British
empire pursued varying policies. The Bank of England, aided by the joint-
stock banks but with no government help, averted a panic in the Baring
crisis. The government of Victoria failed to act and there the banks closed.
In New South Wales and New Zealand prompt governmental action
saved the situation. Newfoundland, the oldest colony of England and the
poorest with self-government, was so hard hit that the local banks closed
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permanently. In 1894 a Canadian bank, the Bank of Montreal, upon
invitation, established a branch in the island. Some Canadian banking
institutions, notably the Bank of Montreal and the Bank of Nova Scotia,
had become powerful enough to operate outside the Dominion. Scottish
influence was strong in Canadian banking. Canada chartered only a few
banks which established branches as settlements expanded and need for
more banks arose.
Much of the new capital formation in the colonies took place in what
has since been labelled the ‘public sector’. Australasian and Indian rail-
ways were built by the various governments because sorely needed lines
held out so little hope of profit that private companies could not be
induced to undertake their construction. Newfoundland built a short
railway line which with other public utilities were later handed over to a
Canadian capitalist almost as a free gift. At the time of the confederation
in 1867 the Canadian railways were privately owned. But the Inter-
colonial Railway linking Halifax with Quebec was constructed and
operated by the government, and the Canadian Pacific was built by a
company which received extensive aid from the Dominion government.
Practical needs rather than theories concerning government ownership
shaped the railway policies of Greater Britain.
The trend in currency policies, which ultimately placed all the leading
trading nations on a gold basis, led to a decline in commodity prices which
by the ’nineties threatened disaster. In the nick of time gold discoveries in
Africa, America, and Australia saved the situation. Many of these dis-
coveries were in British lands — all of them stimulated action in the
financial world. The resultant up-swing in price levels benefited the eco-
nomy throughout the British empire.
In addition to capital Britain supplied manpower to the young countries
beyond the seas. Between 1870 and 1901 more than six million persons
emigrated. This mass migration which relieved unemployment at home
provided an immense contribution of young and vigorous producers of
wealth to the new lands. Though about 65 per cent of the migrants went
to the United States, the hundreds of thousands who chose to remain
British subjects settled empty areas and developed the natural resources
of Greater Britain. New Zealand’s population trebled, Australia’s sub-
stantially increased, and in Canada the influx of British immigrants offset
emigration to the United States.
Migrations of a different type altered the demographic picture in several
sections of the empire. Coolies recruited in China helped to build the
Canadian Pacific Railway; India provided labourers for railway building
in East Africa. The Fiji Islands, like Natal and the West Indies, obtained
Indian workers for plantations. The attempt of Queensland planters to
bring in Polynesians was thwarted by the combined efforts of Australian
labour and British humanitarians. Ultimately the self-governing colonies
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devised methods to bar orientals. Canada was more hospitable to immi-
grants from continental Europe than was Australia. Before the end of the
century the province of Manitoba had polyglot communities of Germans,
Icelanders, Russians, and Ukrainians, but the Australasians maintained
their marked preference for English and Scottish immigrants.
Within the British Isles shifts of population intensified old troubles and
created new ones. Large movements of peoples from rural to urban areas
and from Ireland and Scotland into England brought about serious
housing and sanitation problems. An influx of Jewish refugees from
Poland and Russia boosted the number of slum dwellers and furthered the
growth of sweated industries. Sweating was, however, not confined to
English cities. In the early 1890’s its prevalence in Melbourne worried
Victorian social workers.
The cause of the British farmer’s plight was a boon to the industrial
labourer. When food prices declined real wages rose. Still, millions lived
in squalor and suffered want. A study sponsored by Charles Booth, an
English shipowner, of Life and Labour in London revealed that in the
richest city in the world hundreds of thousands were undernourished and
dwelt in quarters unfit for human habitation. Other British cities, especi-
ally Glasgow and Liverpool, also had extensive areas where people lived
meanly. Nor were the crowded and insanitary housing conditions con-
fined to the cities. Cottars and crofters in Scotland and peasants in
Ireland lived in hovels little better than cattle byres. Housing legislation,
sponsored principally by the Conservatives, failed to correct the situation.
Better results were achieved in the 1890’s by the newly established London
City Council.
Meanwhile the social conscience of the British people was aroused by
efforts inspired by Christian as well as secular humanitarianism. William
Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, painted in his Darkest England a
grim picture of the misery in the great cities and earnestly appealed for relief
funds. Both the Salvation Army and Dr Barnardo (who devoted his life
to improving the lot of East London waifs) tried to give the destitute,
friendless, and homeless children and adults a start in life by helping them
to emigrate. An Oxford don, Arnold Toynbee, aroused so much interest
in the suffering of the under-privileged that after his death a settlement
house bearing his name was founded in East London. The clergy of the
Established Church took a more active interest in social problems than
they had hitherto done. Missionary societies expanded their activities
both within and outside the empire, and shifted from mere denunciation
of the evils of idol worship to efforts to improve the mundane existence of
the Africans, Asians and South Sea Islanders. The Grenfell medical
mission in Labrador showed the need to improve the life of English-
speaking inhabitants of that neglected segment of the empire.
Proof of the quickened sympathy for the lot of toilers was evidenced by
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the public support for match girls and dock labourers in their strikes for
higher pay and improved working conditions. The dockers were ably led
by John Burns, Tom Mann, and Ben Tillett; they received valuable
assistance from Cardinal Manning and substantial material aid from
Australian labour. Their strike succeeded, and their leaders then compelled
the conservative Trades Union Congress to admit representatives of un-
skilled workers to its deliberations. Thus the New Unionism came into
existence and the tempo of labour agitation was noticeably quickened.
By legislation of the 1870’s the status of the British trade unions was
much improved and factory laws were consolidated and extended. Con-
servatives and Liberals alike courted the labour vote; the eradication of
illiteracy and the appearance of cheap, popular newspapers opened new
ways to reach the common people. This was appreciated by middle-class
intellectuals who were impressed with the gospel of Karl Marx. A coterie
of the most gifted among them founded the Fabian Society which hoped
to reconstruct society ‘ in accordance with the highest moral possibilities ’
by a process of ‘gradualness’. For this purpose the Society published a
large number of tracts which discussed pressing economic and social
questions. The Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour
party were more definitely Marxist in outlook. But none of these organi-
sations attracted a large following among the masses whose real leaders
cherished social ideologies based on Christian traditions. The governing
classes took cognisance of the spread of socialistic doctrines and the
growth of socialism on the Continent; they were also disturbed by the
flight of labour from the land and the complete dependence of workers on
daily wages. To remedy this situation it was proposed to obtain — with
public assistance — allotments or smallholdings for labourers. Laws were
passed to further these aims, but they failed to achieve much influence on
British economic and social conditions.
Although in social legislation Britain lagged behind Germany and
Australasia, ideas for alleviating social ills and ending wasteful economic
warfare were not wanting. Political theorists stressed consideration for
human dignity and self-respect; practical statesmen advocated old-age
pensions and government arbitration in labour disputes. But the passions
aroused over Irish home rule and the renewed attention to imperial
expansion diverted men’s minds from ‘ the condition of England question’.
Young overseas communities, unhampered by the restraining influences
of an old society, could devote themselves more wholeheartedly to making
‘ the gift of life more valuable and the men more worthy of the gift’. In the
language of one of their leaders, William Pember Reeves, in his book on
State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902), the peoples of
Australasia looked ‘upon their colonies as co-operative societies of which
they, men and women, are shareholders, while the governments are
elective boards of directors’. Though they borrowed many ideas from
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Britain and some from America ‘their needs, their aims, their methods
and their reasoning were chiefly the result of their environment and local
experiences’. Breathing ‘the free air of a virgin country’ but trained to
respect order, the Australasians, with Britain as their banker and defender,
could concentrate on local problems. They passed comprehensive factory
laws limiting the hours of labour and fixing a standard minimum wage;
they eliminated sweating; established wages boards and compulsory arbi-
tration in labour disputes ; and inaugurated old-age pensions. They broke
up large landed properties thus providing land seekers with farms, arranged
easy rural credit, and promoted co-operatives. The rise in price levels after
1895 and the easier credit conditions facilitated experiments and attracted
more and more immigrants.
Social legislation had been entrusted in Canada to the provinces, but
they lagged behind Australia in tackling social problems. The subsistence
farming in Quebec, the Canadian homestead Act, the opportunities for
employment in lumber camps and railway construction, the nearness to
the United States which drew job-hunters, the lag in industrial develop-
ment and an aversion to government interference, all combined to create a
Canadian climate of opinion on social and economic issues far different
from that which prevailed in Australasia. In South Africa and the West
Indies the colonists had problems aplenty but neither the means nor the
will to face them. This was also true of India where suffering millions had
been taught to endure patiently all earthly misery and to hope for better
things through rebirth.
In the field of education the changes were many and the progress un-
even. Nationalistic aspirations, racial and religious diversities, lack of
financial support, and disagreements over aims and methods hindered
advance in man’s search for knowledge. As might be expected, educational
opportunities multiplied most rapidly in Britain and in the self-governing
colonies of Australasia and North America. Elementary education was
made compulsory and free, though only in Australasia was it wholly
secularised. Tax-supported secondary schools, universities and university
colleges were founded both in Britain and overseas. In Africa and India
Christian missions continued to play an important role in education on
every level. Among the crown colonies only Ceylon made serious efforts
to organise compulsory education for all children. While Oxford and
Cambridge provided curricula patterns and often teaching staffs for the
new universities, administration frequently followed the federal model of
the University of London.
In both Great and Greater Britain warfare raged between the secularists
and the advocates of religion as the basis for all education. The success of
German education in which natural science was emphasised brought con-
flict between proponents of the traditional classical studies and reformers
who urged adoption of the German system. Whether free education for
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all should end at the elementary school level and whether women should
be admitted to the universities supplied further topics for hair-splitting
academic disputes, with the traditionalists steadily losing ground, especi-
ally in the colonies.
With the passing of time democratic ideas concerning equality of educa-
tional opportunity won wider acceptance. Joseph Chamberlain, who on
so many topics voiced the opinion of true progressives, favoured a Jacob's
ladder in education enabling ‘the poorest amongst us, if he has but the
ability,. . .to rise to the greatest height of culture’. The leading tradition-
alist, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, distrusted new philosophical
systems, enthusiasm, and the emotional approach. He warned tutors ‘to
refrain from any kind of proselytism’, but in harmony with modem views
he welcomed the reduction of ‘the estrangement of class from class’. To
Jowett the main purpose of education was to develop in the student ‘the
sense of power which comes from steady working’. He scorned the
aristocratic idlers who sauntered through Eton and Oxford and imagined
themselves superior beings. His motto was a challenging, ‘Cease to drift’,
and under him ‘Balliol became the nursery of Bishops, Viceroys, and
Cabinet Ministers’.
Jowett’s influence extended to the universities of the empire though his
admonition ‘Cease to drift’ was more applicable to students at Oxford
than to colonials who faced in life a constant challenge to modify what
had been transplanted and to build anew in recently founded com-
munities. English and Scottish influence was strong in the universities of
Greater Britain, but before the end of the century some followed the
German lead in curricula construction, and those of Canada could not
escape ‘contamination’ from south of the border. However, the province
of Quebec formed a notable exception ; there French-speaking Canadians
moulded their educational system on that of France, the homeland which
had long ignored them.
Despite the growing materialistic and secular approach of intellectuals,
the average man in the new democratic age continued to be a religious as
well as a political being. Issues rooted in religious differences frequently
aroused angry discussion in press and legislative halls at home and over-
seas. Religious tests for university, degrees were abolished (except, of
course, in theology); religious equality became general; the Church of
England was disestablished in Ireland and in nearly all of the West Indian
islands; in the early 1890’s a demand arose for its disestablishment in
Wales. Efforts to secularise English elementary education failed; in some
of the Canadian provinces denominational control over education had
constitutional safeguards; the abolition of denominational schools in
Manitoba aroused sharp political controversy. Denominational colleges
sprang up in Australian and Canadian universities. While these colleges
did not acquire the academic status of those at Oxford and Cambridge,
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they clearly indicated religious cleavages within the university community.
In Britain debates over Irish home rule were coloured by religious bias.
In the provinces of Ontario and Quebec and in Australian Victoria
religion was a live political issue. In England attendance at church and
chapel might be declining, but long after the retirement of Gladstone the
non-conformists formed a distinct political force. Interest in religion con-
tinued strong: vast contributions were made to Christian missions in
distant lands, Londoners by the thousand flocked to hear the Baptist
preacher C. H. Spurgeon, the Bible was the best seller among books, and
the Sermon on the Mount was more potent than the Communist Mani-
festo in determining the social attitudes of British labourers.
With the growing literacy the newspaper-reading public vastly in-
creased. A special type of cheap paper which appealed, as Lord Bryce put
it in his Modern Democracies, to the ‘uninstructed, uncritical, and un-
fastidious mass of readers’ gained vogue. The Times, under its great
editor John Thaddeus Delane, had shunned vulgar commercial methods,
avoided party bias, and sought to instruct and elevate public opinion.
Delane’s successors departed from some of his most salutary ideals.
With the issue of Irish home rule The Times became morbidly partisan,
and when it was disclosed that documents discrediting Irish leaders and
printed in The Times were forgeries the paper lost its commanding posi-
tion in British journalism. Even before that catastrophe The Times had
ceased to appeal to those who liked spicy news, brightly and cleverly
presented. Some of the new type of journalists, notably W. T. Stead, used
their talents to arouse public sentiment for much-needed social reforms ;
others, and they were the successful ones, were mainly interested in
profit. Chief among the latter was Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord North-
cliffe) whose achievement is one of the amazing success stories of the
1890’s. He and the journalists of his school appealed to emotion rather
than reason ; they magnified trivialities, gloated over scandals, played up
gossip and treated rumours as facts. The growing tension among the
powers provided material for sensational headlines ; the cloak of patriot-
ism concealed vulgar commercialism and hatred was fostered in the
minds of millions. Lord Salisbury might sneer that Harmsworth’s Daily
Mail was written by ‘office boys for office boys’, but by 1901 its daily
circulation reached a million copies and it had become an important
moulder of public opinion.
Among the leading overseas newspapers were the Toronto Globe and
the Melbourne Age, both strongly partisan in politics. Although on the
editorial page they stressed the special interests of their local areas, news
from Great Britain was featured prominently in their columns, thereby
keeping green the memories of the old homeland.
The growing interest in outdoor sport had both social and imperial
importance. Cricket and football were inexpensive and gave young men a
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chance to win distinction without regard to race or social class. Between
1870 and 1901 these games became very popular, and regional and intra-
imperial contests brought about friendly contacts between scattered units
of the realm. British standards of sportsmanship spread even to remote
corners of the empire.
Many of the colonial political leaders of the nineteenth century were
bom in Britain. Prominent among them were Sir Henry Parkes of New
South Wales and Richard John Seddon of New Zealand. Because they as
well as several of their colleagues had risen from the ranks of labour, their
British origin was probably more of a hindrance than a help to good
understanding between the colonies and Britain. In colonial as in
American politics a humble social background rated as an asset whereas
in England those who had been educated at the famous public schools and
national universities had an advantage even in working-class constitu-
encies. The condescending attitude of British society toward visiting
colonials was a serious obstacle to a union of hearts between Great and
Greater Britain.
Although the progress of political and social reform in Britain and the
growth in the colonies of social amenities and wealth narrowed the gap
between the two societies, the divergencies were still wide and very real.
Adventurous, aggressive men and women had broken home ties and
founded new communities in far-off regions. They rejected Whitehall
dominance over their government and economic life; they defeated efforts
to saddle them with an established church; basically egalitarian, they
resented aristocratic pretensions. British sojourners in the colonies were
as aghast at colonial society as were Charles Dickens and Mrs Trollope at
American social life. It was Robert Lowe’s eleven years in Australia
which made him a bitter opponent of political reform in Britain, and
Governor Sir Arthur Gordon’s experience with colonial assemblies in New
Brunswick and New Zealand convinced him that colonial self-government
was a mistake. In 1 872 Disraeli lamented that in granting autonomy to
the colonies Britain had not retained control over crown land and
customs tariff nor imposed the stipulation that in a war the colonies should
be obligated to aid the mother-country. The true spirit of overseas Britain
was appreciated more fully by his rival, Gladstone, who, as a follower of
Edmund Burke, insisted that ‘freedom and voluntaryism’ should govern
the relations between Britain and her colonies, and who proclaimed his
firm belief that if given freedom they would of their own volition aid
Britain generously in times of trial. This faith was splendidly vindicated
during the Anglo-Boer War when thousands of volunteers from Canada
and Australasia fought for Britain.
Colonial self-government advanced and became more meaningful
between 1870-1901. At the close of this period the Commonwealth of
Australia stood ready to assume its place side by side with the Dominion
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of Canada as a federal state with immense future possibilities. Politically
the overseas communities progressed rapidly toward a sovereign status,
but culturally and economically they remained dependencies. In art, edu-
cation, and literature British patterns dominated. The self-confidence
colonists displayed in subduing the wilderness was not matched in
cultural fields. Their society was too new for that, and aspiring writers such
as Katherine Mansfield had to seek careers in Britain. The United States
attracted talented Canadians. Only one colonial novel, The Story of an
African Farm, won recognition outside its region of origin, and its author,
Olive Schreiner, was the daughter of a German Lutheran missionary to
Bechuanaland.
In March 1894, upon retiring as British Prime Minister, Gladstone
deplored the fact that ‘ the world of today is not the world in which I was
bred and trained, and have principally lived \ He was quite right, though
in many fields his own reforms — the ‘ opening of windows ’ of which he
was so proud — combined with those supported by Disraeli had produced
the changes. Rapidly shifting economic and social conditions and the
growth of political democracy compelled both Liberal and Conservative
governments to depart from John Stuart Mill’s theory of individualism
and to sanction interference with vested interests. The owners of factories,
farms, and ships had to accept government supervision; parents were
required to send their children to school; householders were forced to
observe sanitary regulations. The national government owned the tele-
graph and telephone systems and municipalities operated public utilities.
The good life for which people yearned could materialise only if the power
of the state was enlisted to remove abuses and protect the weak against
the strong.
In 1901 the principle that government should be by the people and
function for the people was more widely recognised overseas than in
Britain. Antipodean colonies accepted the creed, to quote Lord Bryce’s
book again, that ‘ Wealth produced by the toil of the Many must not be
allowed to accumulate in the hands of the Few ’. At home Stanley Jevons,
T. H. Green, and other theorists of the 1 88o’s turned the tables on Mill by
emphasising that the promotion of ‘human development in its richest
diversity’ could succeed only if the state provided the individual with
opportunities for such development. The principle here enunciated had by
the end of the nineteenth century been applied more extensively in the
Australasian colonies than in Britain for the simple reason that the people
who controlled their governments desired to improve economic and social
conditions. As individuals they wanted the good life which could be
obtained only with government assistance. These small societies became
laboratories for legislative experiments which were keenly watched by the
outside world. Thus did Britain’s daughter-nations alter age-old concep-
tions of the functions of the state.
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The wide acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution created a climate
of opinion in intellectual circles far different from that in which Gladstone
‘was bred and trained’. Bravely the old statesman sought to stem the
swelling tide of materialism and scepticism by affirming his unshakable
faith in ‘The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture’. Support came
from an unusually able political opponent, Arthur James Balfour, who
in 1895 published a clever polemical essay, The Foundations of Belief.
But the virus of unbelief was spreading. As British labourers deserted
the chapel for the labour temple they became more and more impregnated
with the tenets of materialism.
Britain had advanced towards political democracy and, with the great
increase of educational opportunity, the foundations had been laid for a
social democracy of the type found in the colonies. But few outward signs
of the latter process were discernible by 1901. Britain’s old social struc-
ture was being constantly undermined, but social pageantry was still
unchanged; the stately city mansions and country palaces of the aristo-
crats were well staffed ; peers of recent creation were eager to adopt the
standards established by those of ancient lineage ; the lower classes were
politely deferential ; glitter and gold abounded. Despite this, a few states-
men were uneasy. Foreign competition grew keener, and the perils of
diplomatic isolation could not be ignored. Among those who espied
breakers ahead was Joseph Chamberlain. He was so disturbed that he
considered the possibility of a new tariff policy, and he advocated a triple
alliance— Britain, Germany and the United States. But neither his own
countrymen nor the prospective allies fell in with the alliance proposal.
Both Great and Greater Britain were affected by the currents of
nationalism which grew steadily stronger toward the close of the nine-
teenth century. A Secretary for Scotland was appointed, Wales obtained
a national university, and the Irish national movement broadened to
include culture and language. Signs of an Indian renaissance multiplied,
and the ancient races of the vast Asian sub-continent grew politically
restive. Although Australasians had not yet developed a genuine ‘at
homeness’, they became more self-assertive. The debtor-creditor relation-
ship between them and Britain created friction. In common with Canada
they might delight in the privileges of being daughters in their ‘mother’s
house’ but they were also insistent upon recognition as complete mistresses
of their own.
In Canada the growth of nationalism was hindered by sharp division
between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians. The former
held that as the first settlers in the land they and they alone were the true
Canadians. They cherished their language and their Roman Catholic
religion. The latter was a barrier between them and the people of Ontario
where the powerful Association of Orangemen kept alive religious ani-
mosities imported from Ireland. However, habitans of Quebec, Orange-
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men of Ontario, and descendants of the loyalists who had abandoned
homes in the United States to remain British subjects were united in a
determination not to have their country swallowed up by its powerful
neighbour. They wanted to be Canadians and to prove that cultural
differences would not prevent the development of a Canadian national
state. Their Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, might speak eloquently to
British audiences of his pride in being a British subject, but he showed
time and again that first and foremost he was a Canadian, a true son of
the land to which in 1665 his ancestors had come.
In 1901 white South Africa was politically united by the British annexa-
tion the previous year of the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State. It was hoped that this annexation would result in the
establishment on the African sub-continent of a new nation resembling the
Dominion of Canada. But even before Briton and Boer were locked in
the mortal combat of the South African War signs had appeared heralding
the rise of a new national movement rooted in the soil of South Africa, a
movement centred about the memory of forbears who had settled the land,
migrated to the interior to found their own states, defeated fierce tribes,
and steadfastly refused to become Anglicised. Unlike the French-speaking
Canadians, the Afrikaaners of South Africa were anxious to cut cultural
bonds with the homeland, the Netherlands, and to elevate the status of
their spoken language, Afrikaans. They hoped that this language and the
traditions built up through generations of conflict and toil would form the
bases for a European South African nation.
Meanwhile the sands in the hour-glass were running out for the old
Queen. Her reign had lasted longer and been filled with more changes
than any other in British history. She had been out of sympathy with the
democratic ideals which won wide acceptance during her era. She had
never visited any of her dominions overseas. In most respects the spirit
animating their peoples was not only foreign but was actually repugnant to
her. Still, she had been an inspiration to her subjects; she was the out-
ward symbol of the unity of a far-flung empire. Her unflinching courage,
stern devotion to duty, and great strength of character had set a pattern
of conduct and provided encouragement and hope in times of trial. When
black tidings came thick and fast from South Africa, word went out that
the Queen was not discouraged. This well publicised message had a
bracing effect all around. Since her accession to the throne the British
empire had grown immensely. The Queen had welcomed territorial
annexations and resented the abandonment of outposts whether in Africa
or in Asia. The idea of home rule for Ireland she absolutely detested. But
by approving the grant of self-government to overseas colonies Queen
Victoria furthered the service of Britain as a founder of nations. Her place
in history is comparable to that of England’s Gloriana, Queen Elizabeth I.
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INDIA, 1840-1905
I n tracing Indian developments in the second half of the nineteenth
century it is important to balance carefully the Indian and British sides
of the scales. And the British side was not British only, but European
and western as well, for in much of their activity the British were har-
bingers of general western culture rather than the purveyors of Anglo-
Saxondom. In the past there has been a tendency to regard the significant
features of Victorian India as the completion of the British dominion, and
the gradual spread of British administrative techniques and public works,
of western cultural ideas and western humane values. The groups who
secured the decision to introduce western institutions into India believed
that Indian institutions were effete and Indian traditional ideas inferior if
not positively harmful. They looked to a gradual replacement of things
Indian by things European, though they did not all clothe their expecta-
tion in the vivid imagery of Macaulay. The first school of writers on
British India were fascinated by the spectacle of the rise of British power,
the most striking and lasting, as they believed, in the long procession of
Indian empire. There followed, with James Mill’s History as a bridge,
those who thought that the true significance of British Indian history
consisted in the introduction of western institutions. Both schools were
absorbed in the British raj; while the first emphasised the raj, the second
emphasised the British. Neither, along with most contemporary admini-
strators, thought that India herself had much to offer towards her own
future. When Indians seemed slow in accepting things western it was put
down to darkness of mind or obstinacy and the men of the Panjab school
developed an administrative puritanism which toiled without hope of
reward (from India), determined to do India good in spite of herself.
With the rise of the nationalist movement in the twentieth century this
perspective radically changed. It was realised not only that India had a
great deal to do with her future but that the forces moulding Indian
opinion were by no means wholly western. Indian ideas, discounted by
all but a few in Victorian times, were as important as western ones, and
Indian opinion as the views of Whitehall or Simla. The study of the
development of Indian opinion and society, virtually ‘put on ice’ at the
end of the eighteenth century, was resumed and seen to be as significant
as that of British political or administrative measures. Indian history was
seen to be Indian once more. Its significance lay not only in what the
British did in India but in how the Indians reacted. This process has yet
far to go, at the hands of both British and Indian historians, before a true
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balance is achieved, but it is from this point of view that this brief survey
is attempted. We first see a flowing tide of western influence stirring the
apparently stagnant waters of traditional India; we then witness those
waters stirring in their turn to form in the twentieth century a composite
current of unanalysable proportions flowing towards an unknown destina-
tion. It is the study of what the Englishman did and what the Indian
thought about it.
It was only when inter-Indian wars deepened into anarchy at the end of
the eighteenth century and the French menace reappeared with Napoleon
that both Company and British government agreed that hegemony was
the necessary condition of continued trade. The final decision was taken
in 1815 and supremacy achieved in 1818. Thus far British rule in India,
despite parliament’s insistence that it should be a just rule, was a rule for
trade. Neither glory nor welfare was a primary object.
Coincidentally with the final establishment of supremacy the Company
felt the force of the free trade and humanitarian winds then ranging
Britain. It thus came about that just before hegemony was completed
private traders and missionaries were admitted to India. There was to be
free trade in both goods and ideas. This political decision to control India
and this ending of monopoly set up a ferment of ideas and opinions,
which in turn involved further decisions. It was necessary to exclude
rivals from the north-west as well as from overseas. Beyond Afghanistan
lay Persia and beyond Persia Russia. From these considerations sprang
the north-west policy of successive Indian and British governments.
Within India itself it was necessary to organise an administration on a
stable basis. This involved a recasting of the revenue system and an
intensive study of old land systems upon which the revenue mainly
depended. It involved regularising relations with the Indian princes who
still controlled more than half the area of India and a third of its popula-
tion. And along with the administration of the people, it involved the
question of the policy to be pursued towards the ideas and traditions of
the people.
In the decade 1820-30 the second great decision of nineteenth-century
British Indian policy was worked out. The pressure groups concerned
with it in Britain were the Utilitarians and the Evangelicals; they were
supported by the first sign of articulate public opinion in India in the form
of Ram Mohan Roy and his friends in Calcutta. The decision to introduce
British institutions and western knowledge into India (the latter through
the medium of the English language) meant that the East India Company’s
dominion was no longer to be old Mughal empire writ large, the concept
of Warren Hastings and the old school of Anglo-Indians. It meant the
inauguration of a cultural revolution and its purpose was the eventual
westernisation of India. The means were characteristically moderate and
British. Indian institutions, with few exceptions, were not to be openly
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attacked or brushed aside. They were to be matched by British counter-
parts as it were and the people left free to opt between them. The decision
was implemented by the Whig government of the reform era in Britain
and by Lord William Bentinck in India.
A third decision dates from this period, though it will not be found in
any enactment or statement of policy. It was taken for granted rather
than argued about. It was the economic subordination of India to
Britain. In the days of the Company there was no thought of putting
obstacles in the way of British trade in the possible interests of India. To
this general attitude two factors must be added. Free-trade theories were
spreading their influence, making it possible to argue that the non-
regulation of trade in India conformed with economic doctrine and so was
in the best interests of India herself. Secondly, the industrial revolution
had developed to a point where cotton technology, taking its raw product
from America, could sell the finished article more cheaply in India than
the India hand-weaver using his own raw materials. India became a
market for British industry in a way it had not been before. Both theory
and interest dictated that non-interference should continue; and techno-
logy ruled that the age-old Indian weaving industry should be undermined.
It is the effects of these decisions and developments which we see being
worked out in the years succeeding 1840. On the political side a new all-
India government had been developed, bearing a recognisable resemblance
to its Mughal predecessor. Slowly and diffidently western ideas were
introduced, caution ruling that the changes should be peripheral rather
than fundamental. Internationally India had again become a single entity
and one of the Asian powers. Her government was foreign, as in the
sixteenth century, but whereas in the sixteenth century foreign influence
came from the north-west, in the nineteenth it came from overseas. Both
powers were expansionist but in opposite directions, the Mughal empire
extending steadily from north-west to south-east, the British from south-
east to north-west. But the foreign policy of the new Indian state was
affected by factors external to itself in a way in which that of the Mughal
empire never was. Frontier and foreign policies were influenced by the
power-politics of Europe; Russian moves in the Balkans or eastern
Europe as well as in central Asia could modify the action of the Indian
government.
The second major result was a social and cultural revolution. By a
series of measures, not specifically designed for the purpose, the old
dominant classes were undermined, and the rise of a new class, whose
interests were intertwined with the new regime, was promoted. At the
same time a cultural revolution was launched by means of the new
westernising educational policy. The two revolutions were interlinked, for
the social changes pushed into the background the old classes who clung
to the old culture and provided at the same time in the new class a social
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soil in which western culture could take root. By these measures the seed-
bed and the seed of modem India were produced.
The third result was a period of economic colonialism when India was
regarded as a source of raw materials for the industries of Britain and a
market for British goods. Whereas the second result was the cause of
most of the goodwill and influence which Britain has enjoyed in modem
India, this third caused much of the criticism and resentment felt by the
politically minded classes in the twentieth century.
The period may be divided into three phases. The first, to 1 858, covers the
completion of the Company’s dominion and includes the Mutiny and its
suppression. The second, which may be called the heyday of imperialism
in the sense that there was no practical or theoretical rival to British rule,
lasts to 1880. The third, from 1880 to 1905, a period during which the
British power in India apparently reached its zenith, is more significant
for the development of forces which were eventually to replace it. In
dealing with the first period it will be convenient to recall the political
background against which the various developments are set. The Indian
government was far from being a mere puppet manipulated on cabinet
strings, but it was nevertheless a subordinate agency. A Governor-General
could annex a province and inform Whitehall afterwards but he could also
be and was in fact on occasion recalled. Local discretion was large, but in
the main Indian policy was London’s policy. The period opens with the
reforming Whig administration of Lord Melbourne in its last stage of
decrepitude. Its nominee Lord Auckland reflected, by comparison with
his predecessor Lord William Bentinck, the declining Whig energy.
Intending to be a reforming Governor-General he had become entangled
in Afghan affairs at the joint behest of his political advisers and Lord
Palmerston. His retirement synchronised with the advent of Sir Robert
Peel’s Conservative government, and his successor was Wellington’s
President of the Board of Control, Lord Ellenborough. Ellenborough
found himself confronted with the Afghan disaster of 1841-2 from which,
after some hesitation, he extricated the Company with skill. But his
exuberant imagination led him to the annexation of Sind in very doubtful
circumstances while his autocratic temper aroused so much opposition
that the Directors exercised their power of recall for the last time after he
had ruled India for little more than two years. Peel’s cabinet softened the
blow by appointing as his successor his brother-in-law, the first Lord
Hardinge. He was a Waterloo veteran, a cautious soldier-statesman who
had been Secretary-at-War and Chief Secretary of Ireland, and was chosen
partly in view of the threatening Sikh situation. He carried through the
first Sikh war and retired when the Whigs were again in office under Lord
John Russell. Though it was his military achievement which clung to his
name, in fact he carried on the internal policy of his predecessors. The
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new conservatism of Peel derived from liberal Tories like Canning and
Huskisson in the ’twenties rather than from Wellington or Eldon. There
was no serious party cleavage on Indian internal affairs and that which
existed on its external policy was linked with the debate on British foreign
policy in general. So the suppression of suttee — the burning of widows on
the funeral pyres of their husbands — and of infanticide in Indian states
was promoted, the educational developments continued unchecked. In
addition the great irrigation system of the Ganges was commenced and
the first plans made for an Indian railway system.
Hardinge’s successor was the Earl of Dalhousie, a Peelite who had made
his name as Vice-President of the Board of Trade under Gladstone in
Peel’s cabinet, where he wrestled strenuously to control the railway boom
of the 1840’s. Only thirty-six years old, he was endowed with great energy
and will-power, and he dominated India for the next eight years. He com-
bined an imperious temper with his enthusiasm, but did not add much
human sympathy to his imagination. Such a man, who wore himself out
with his labours, and possessed an artist’s sensibility to any check or
criticism, might easily have clashed with the Home authorities. That this
did not happen was due to two factors. One was that his outlook accorded
with the general spirit of early Victorian England. He embodied its rest-
less energy, its belief in material progress and in the superiority of western
civilisation. The other was the confused political situation in Britain at the
time. The break-up of the Conservative party in 1846 left Britain virtually
in the hands of a central corps of Whigs and Peelites with Radicals and
Protectionists skirmishing on the wings. Four ministries were in office
during Dalhousie’s tenure and all were inclined to leave their capable
lieutenant in India to his own devices. Might he not reorganise them if he
came back too full of energy? Dalhousie went to India in 1848 as an
apostle of western progress which he hoped to intensify. The rebellion of
Mul Raj in the Panjab diverted his attention and led to its annexation, but
he was not in intention an annexationist. He was led into this course by
his very belief in western progress. Western administration, he believed,
was immeasurably better for the people than Indian, and therefore the
more Indian states that could be absorbed the better. This belief in
westemism explains the other activities of his government which are so
often overlooked in criticism of his imperialism and arguments about the
doctrine of lapse. (The doctrine of lapse claimed that paramountcy
involved British recognition of heirs of princely states. In the absence of
direct natural heirs Hindu law allowed adoption. The doctrine of lapse
insisted that adoption must be recognised by the supreme government;
otherwise the state would pass by 4 lapse ’ to the Company.) It was he who
planned the railway system of India and introduced the telegraph; who
with Sir Charles Wood planned the first Indian universities; who pro-
posed to place Indians on the new Legislative Council. It has been said
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that his administrative monument was the Panjab and the Panjab school
and his political legacy the mutiny; more important than either were
the foundations he laid for twentieth-century India.
Against this background of solid support in Britain and naive belief in
western moral superiority, in material progress and the virtues of com-
mercial enterprise we can set the events of these eighteen years. In the
realm of power the policy was one of security. At no time was the govern-
ment of India consciously aggressive. That is, it never desired more than
the security of the natural Indian frontiers. But it periodically suffered
from nerves about possible dangers, and tended to over-insure against
exaggerated perils. This mentality was later described by the great Lord
Salisbury as the proposal to occupy the moon in order to guard against an
attack from Mars. The first Afghan entanglement of 1 838-42 was partly
created by this neurosis as well as by the exigencies of Lord Palmerston’s
Russian policy and by downright bad judgement. The second Afghan war,
the third Burman war (1885-6) and Curzon’s invasion of Tibet were all
cases of aggressions by the over-fearful. In Burma the bogey was the
French, elsewhere the Russians. In the case of the second Burman war
(1852) and the Tibetan campaign we see another basic motive at work as
well — the desire for markets which it was believed benighted regimes were
denying to honest traders.
The result of the Afghan adventure convinced the authorities that India
had not the resources to dominate the Iranian plateau. For the next
generation the policy was to rely on the weakness of the powers in that
area and to use a friendly Afghanistan as a buffer state. It was only when
nervousness again overcame common sense in the 1870’s that this policy
was reversed. In historical geopolitics the security of India has depended
primarily on the existence of a strong north Indian power which could
effectively dominate the sub-continent. It has been when this condition
was lacking that the major successful incursions into India have occurred,
like those of the Kushans, the Huns and the Turks, of Taimur, of Babur
and the British. Even Chinghiz Khan knocked in vain at the door of the
determined Tughluq Delhi sultanate. This condition satisfied, security
next required a friendly or controlled Indonesia to the east and Iranian
plateau to the north-west. Historically Indonesia never proved threaten-
ing. On the north-western plateau has existed historic Iran with the
central Asian regions beyond, from which came periodical incursions of
Turks and Mongols. Central Asia may be compared to a reservoir fed
from hidden springs which periodically and unpredictably overflowed to
flood the adjacent regions. Since India could not dominate the Iranian
plateau, her interest lay in the existence of a strong Iranian power, which
would provide an adequate political dam against the flooding of the
central Asian reservoir. The natural balance of power, which the Company
vainly sought within India in the late eighteenth century, was in fact to be
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found outside. It lay between a north Indian and an Iranian power centre,
whose understood balance would enable them to withstand pressure from
the west, north and east. This condition had been satisfied in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, when the Mughal Indian empire had been
balanced by the Safavid dynasty of Persia. In the eighteenth century both
powers collapsed. The Company provided a revival of the Indian power
in the nineteenth century, and its position was strengthened in the east by
the virtual British control through sea-power of the Dutch rulers of the
East Indies. In the north-west, however, Iran remained weak and the first
Afghan war showed the perils of attempting to control the plateau from
India. Beyond Iran the Khanates of Turkestan were in obvious decay.
But as their strength drained away, Russia began to take their place as the
replenishing force of the reservoir. Indian policy in the north-west, apart
from European considerations, depended upon current readings of the
gauge in this central Asian reservoir.
Within India itself power-politics took the form of completion of
dominion. The motives of security, of commerce and even of humanism
can be noticed, but the dominant one was that of security. The Afghan
war involved the use of independent Sind as an avenue of approach, since
it was not desired to depend wholly on the Panjab route in the unsettled
conditions following the death of its ruler Ranjit Singh in 1 839. The Amirs
of Sind were divided, incompetent and obscurantist. They formed a
splinter of the former Afghan Durrani monarchy and had themselves no
great claim to legality. Their country invited development. The tempta-
tion to secure a good frontier was strong. The territory was annexed in
1843, the shabby glories of Miani providing Ellenborough with some
compensation for his withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thereafter it was
ruled with rude vigour for some years by Sir Charles Napier, its conqueror.
It became a part of the Presidency of Bombay and the newly acquired
Karachi the port for the Panjab and a model city. The Panjab was ac-
quired as the result of two wars in 1845-6 and 1848-9. The first campaign
was precipitated by the anarchy which supervened on the death of Ranjit
Singh in 1839. The fine Sikh army dissolved into com m ittee-run factions
manipulated by ruthless and ambitious chiefs. There were four rulers in
six years and the army was eventually encouraged by the Regency Council
to cross the Sutlej in the hope that the British would draw its sting. In
the first settlement the method of a protected state was tried with a
reduced army and a Regency Council headed by Henry Lawrence. In
1848 a revolt in Multan was allowed to gather strength throughout the
hot weather and was then crushed in a series of bloody battles. The
British had little more generalship than the Sikhs, but they had reinforce-
ments. On this occasion Dalhousie decided on annexation, which he
carried out before referring to London. His reasons were the apparent
irreconcilability of the Sikh sardars — the word widely used in northern
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India, especially by Sikhs, to mean nobles, leaders, gentry — and the
necessity of safeguarding the frontier on the north-west. The fact that the
Sikhs had been an unloved ruling minority reduced the danger of con-
spiracy within, a danger which was further reduced by John Lawrence’s
policy of encouraging the peasant at the expense of the sardar and pro-
moting material improvement. Irrigation washed away revenge. The
Panjab was won by the sword and retained by the spade. At the mutiny
crisis the Muslims could be relied upon to check any Sikh attempt at revolt,
and the Sikhs enjoyed frustrating the Mughal revival in Delhi. It may be
said that the British did everything with the Panjab except integrate its
people. The third measure of completion was the annexation of Burma.
Lower Burma with Rangoon was annexed by Dalhousie in 1852 after a
model campaign in a war provoked in about equal proportions by
Burman obtuseness and British commercial brashness. This was the real
beginning of British Burma for here were the Burman people as distinct
from the hill tribes of Arakan and Tenasserim and here were the rice
areas which were to give modem Burma its wealth and its problems.
Upper Burma was annexed in 1886 from the crazy King Theebaw. The
motive for this final act was fear of French influence and a desire to
counterbalance their threatened intervention in Siam. The Burmans
differed both by race and culture from the Indian peoples and were never
assimilated. The Indian administrative system, applied with such care by
Dalhousie’s Chief Commissioner Phayre, proved a major misfit.
Within India itself the government had to deal with the remnants of
earlier authorities. Their military power had been effectually curbed by
the rise of British control, but many of them retained a traditional or
tribal appeal. First among them was the Mughal emperor himself at
Delhi: Wellesley, while providing the blind Shah Alam with comfort and
honour in 1803, had carefully avoided committing himself either to
allegiance or repudiation. Later official generations gradually, in Charles
Metcalfe’s words, ‘renounced their former allegiance to the House of
Taimur’. The Mughal became an expensive nuisance. The sovereignty of
the Crown in India was declared in the Charter Act of 1833 ; the recogni-
tion of the Mughal imperial status was gradually whittled away until in
1856 the heir was induced to agree to vacate the palace and renounce the
imperial title on his father’s death. The case of the princes was somewhat
different, for they still controlled nearly half of the country and one-third
of the people. The paramountcy of the Company was assumed rather than
proclaimed. But the princes were not integrated in the new system. They
were placed in ‘subordinate isolation’, secluded estates as it were, where
the old life could continue behind diplomatic walls untouched by the rush
of western progress without. The difficulty of this policy lay in the fact that
the new world and Europeans could not in fact be kept out, while the
princes, shorn of ambition by British restraint and of fear for themselves
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by British support, ceased to interest themselves in government. This
created a contrast between British and princely standards which posed a
moral dilemma to the ruling power. How could non-interference be
reconciled with princely behaviour and British public standards, or inter-
ference with British obligations? The first attempt to resolve this dilemma
was made by Dalhousie with his annexation policy. Dalhousie believed
that British administration was immensely better than Indian and that
annexation was desirable whenever possible. While blind neither to
ancient rights nor to modem dangers, he shared to the full the self-
confidence of his generation. One side of his policy was the doctrine of
lapse, which enabled him to take over several Hindu states including
extensive Nagpur and influential Satara in the absence of direct heirs.
Another was the belief that misgovemment justified acquisition, which
secured the Panjab by conquest, Berar by negotiation and Oudh by
annexation. In eight years princely India was reduced by a quarter
in area and population; then the process was abruptly halted by the
Mutiny.
The government itself attained its highest degree of centralisation at
this time. The Charter Act of 1833 created a Governor-General of India
in place of Fort William in Bengal. Legislative power was concentrated
in Calcutta, its sole distinction from the executive being the presence of an
additional Member of Council for legislative purposes. (The first ‘Law
member’ was Thomas Babington Macaulay.) In practice the other presi-
dencies became local agencies ; though they retained their own forces these
were overshadowed by the size and prestige of the Bengal army. The Civil
Service was similarly divided, with Bengal enjoying a corresponding
eminence. In 1853 this service was thrown open to competition, with a
resulting rise in general standards though not in exceptional talent. The
most interesting development was the institution of a separate legislative
council in 1853 which, though official and judicial in composition, had
some representative character and quickly claimed a freedom of speech
which won it the name of the Little Parliament.
The third theme of this period is that of western influence. The move-
ment given official recognition by Lord William Bentinck and his advisers
went steadily forward. It had three main aspects. The first, largely un-
intentional in its results, but an essential part of the whole process, was
the breaking down of the old governing and privileged classes. The second
was the policy of introducing western education and ideas, with institutions
allied to them, and the third a policy of public works which involved
western techniques and a western-trained class for their maintenance. The
first set of measures displaced and rendered powerless the classes who
clung to the old order, political and cultural; the second and third both
injected western ideas into the country and created conditions for a class
imbibing them. The rise of modem India has depended not only upon the
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entry of western ideas into India but upon their absorption by a specially
created class.
The social revolution, too little regarded but fundamental for an under-
standing of modem India, began in the time of Cornwallis in the late
eighteenth century. An outward sign was the exclusion of Indians from
higher government service. The Charter Act of 1793 reserved all admini-
strative posts worth more than £500 a year to covenanted servants of the
presidency concerned; no Indians were covenanted servants. The reposi-
tories of Indian political tradition were thus thrown back upon themselves
or into Indian state service. Still more important was the series of land
settlements, beginning with the Permanent Settlement and continuing
beyond the Mutiny. This work grew increasingly accurate and mindful of
local conditions. It was informed by a desire to define and delimit, to do
justice to peasant and landlord and to preserve if possible the village com-
munities. But the improving spirit of the age would creep in, giving a twist
which mined the old landed aristocracy and extinguished the village
communities. There was at first a general tendency, through ignorance, to
over-assess. The penalty of unpunctual or incomplete payment was the
un-Indian one of dispossession, legalised in the hated Sales law. By these
means the character of the whole landed class in Bengal and Behar was
changed and much land changed hands elsewhere. This process was
reinforced by the widespread resumption of rent-free tenures, extensively
practised in northern and western India up to the Mutiny. R. M. Bird and
J. Thomason carried this on in the North-Western provinces, and the Inam
Commission in Bombay. These lands were granted for services rendered,
for educational and religious purposes; while in many cases the grants
had been forgotten or their purpose abused, the result of wholesale con-
fiscation was to ruin an influential class which supported the old culture
and religion. By deprivation of office, by loss of land and public esteem,
this class was driven into a back-water of the national life, there to stag-
nate amidst memories of past glories.
Their place was to be supplied by a new class filled with new thoughts.
But first the thoughts had to be made available. The policy of imparting
western knowledge through the medium of English was launched by
Bentinck and Macaulay in 1835. During the next twenty years a network
of schools spread over the country. In 1853 Sir Charles Wood’s dispatch
led to the establishment of a grant-in-aid system which enabled private
schools and colleges to be established, gave the educational system form
and crowned it with the first three universities, opened in 1857. Alongside
government activity in this direction must be noticed that of Christian
missionaries, whose outstanding leader was Alexander Duff of Calcutta
and greatest monument the Madras Christian College. Along with western
education went western law. In 1861 the new penal code, based on
English law, finally came into force. Perhaps even more important was
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the introduction of English procedure and legal assumptions in the
Company’s courts. Western concepts were absorbed by the new lawyers as
it were ambulando. Hindu and Muslim private laws were preserved, but
doubtful cases, of which there were many, were decided on the principles
of English equity. Much of the western influence in the courts was sub-
liminal, and perhaps all the more effective for that. The tale of govern-
mental western influence was completed by the replacement of Persian by
English as the language of the courts and official business. This provided
an urgent reason for learning English, and learning English meant attend-
ing the new colleges and absorbing western ideas. Government servants,
lawyers, merchants and professional men all over India needed English
for their work and you could not learn English, any more than you could
learn Persian or French, without tasting, however slightly, the flavour of
its culture. The process was helped on by professional education establish-
ments such as the Medical College in Calcutta, where dissection involved
the breaking of high-caste rules, and Dalhousie’s engineering college at
Roorkee. Apart from direct evangelism, perhaps more a hindrance than a
help, mission activity in promoting schools, hospitals and orphanages
furthered the process in the countryside.
The remaining aspect of western influence was the policy of public
works. Here was something which could be pursued without regard to
vexing questions of caste and culture, of ethics and local custom. The
moral reformer and the upholder of tradition, the innovator and the
nervous realist, could compromise on bricks and mortar. This develop-
ment is specially associated with Dalhousie. The first activity was that of
communications. Road-building began systematically after 1818. The
seal was set on it, as it were, by Dalhousie’s completion of the Grand
Trunk Road to Peshawar, in which he took an almost lyrical pleasure, and
the cutting of the Simla hill-road to the Tibetan border. For several
months in 1850 he governed India from the mountain fastness of Chini,
200 miles from the plains. Roads were the prelude to railways. The first
steps towards their introduction were taken by Lord Hardinge, but their
planning as a system was the work of Dalhousie. Equipped with the
experience of grappling with the English railway boom of the 1840’s, he
set about planning on a comprehensive scale. With the support of Sir
Charles Wood in London his Railway minute of 1853 became the basis of
an integrated system of rail communication which was to have incalcul-
able consequences for the country. In the absence of good rivers outside
Bengal and the northern plain, railways provided a system of social and
economic arteries through which the life-blood of the new India could
pour. The third form of public works was irrigation. The first step in this
direction was the restoration of the Mughal and Tughluq Canal from the
upper Jumna to Delhi in 1820. Major early works were the Grand Anicut
two miles across the river Cauvery in the south (1835-6) and the Ganges
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Canal, completed by Dalhousie in 1854. These measures between them
began to knit India together into a physical unity unknown before and to
make the first serious inroads on the tyranny of nature, with its periodical
flail of famine, over the Indian peasant.
The Indian response to these influences was significant. Philanthro-
pists’ hopes of an early collapse of the Indian social and religious systems
were disappointed. But the small group which gathered round the re-
markable figure of Ram Mohan Roy, who died in 1833 while on a visit to
England, in Bengal welcomed western thought as well as western works.
The Brahmo Samaj, founded by him in 1828, and supported by the Tagore
family, began the process of assimilation on the religious and social plane.
Bodies like the Landholders Association and the British India Association
pushed the work into the political sphere. The ideas of this group were to
percolate, by means of the new press, personal contacts, the new means of
communication, and the Bengali migration to the north in government
service, all through the growing class of people attached to the new
activities of the government.
The developments here mentioned acquired a faster tempo, a greater
sense of urgency, as it were, in the time of Dalhousie. He was an embodi-
ment of the improving Victorian, too anxious to drive forward to notice
the jolts given to the car of progress by the stones of custom and preju-
dice. His record was one of ceaseless activity: in politics, annexations; in
material matters, public works— the Public Works Department was
created by him in 1853 — and irrigation; in the world of ideas, western
education. There was a general feeling of confidence and security.
Upon this decorously improving world burst the mutiny of the Bengal
army, which is generally dated from the Meerut outbreak of 10 May, or
the seizure of Delhi on 1 1 May 1857. Originating from a caste grievance
provoked by administrative bungling, it developed into a general rising of
the Bengal army backed by agrarian and religious movements in a number
of districts. Both Mughal and Maratha sentiment was stirred with a
cross-current of Muslim as distinct from imperial sentiment. In a military
sense the situation was saved by the defence of Lucknow, the investment
of Delhi against greatly superior forces and the firmness of John Lawrence
in the Panjab. Politically the government owed much to the loyalty of the
Sikhs and the princes. Notable features were the shock caused by the out-
break and the intensity of the feelings aroused on both sides with their
respective legacies of memory and bitterness. When we come to analyse
the forces at work, it is clear that the soldiers were not moved to such
lengths by an isolated caste grievance. The soldier and, to some extent, the
country as a whole were suffering from a divided soul, and the extremity
of their behaviour was in proportion to the degree of tension from which
they suffered. To the soldier the choice seemed to be loyalty and loss of
caste and self-respect — but the word self-respect does not express the full
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depth of meaning involved, which is expressed in the untranslatable word
Uzzat (cjy .) — or mutiny and almost certain death in view of the quickly
ascertained implacability of the British. Only in some such way can the
sudden mutinies following professions of loyalty be accounted for. The
suspicions of the soldier had a general background; specific sources of
discontent, like the General Service Enlistment Act and the annexation of
Oudh, do not in themselves explain the nature of the outbreak any more
than does the greased cartridges incident, which was merely the spark to
the powder train. In other circumstances the incident would have been
explained and forgotten but, as it was, the more the authorities tried to
explain and redress, the deeper grew the soldier’s conviction of ill-intent.
The general feeling of the country, which the soldier sensed through his
family connections, arose from the impact of the new measures on tradi-
tional society. Both the new measures and the new thought challenged
traditional habits and their underlying assumptions. In various ways
caste taboos were threatened — by the abolition of suttee; allowing
Christians to inherit their share of the family property; the caste-defying
attitude of the advanced class in Calcutta — while the new ideas of equality
and moral obligation — spread through the law as well as the colleges —
ran quite contrary to the inequality and privilege of Brahminism. Ortho-
dox society, still under Brahmin influence, was affronted, and found a
convenient scapegoat in the activities of some Christian missionaries.
Political Hindu India had given up the struggle and accepted the Com-
pany as a new irresistible Mughal; it was orthodox India that felt itself
threatened. So Hindu India was disturbed in its most vital part, that of
religion and custom. The Sepoy revolt arose out of this unrest, bringing it
to a focus. The mutiny as a whole was essentially a convulsive effort by
Indian conservatism to put the clock back before it was too late. It is
noticeable that wherever there was a rebel success, there was a harking
back to traditional models, Mughal or Maratha. The new westernised
class, the ancestors of the modern nationalists, were everywhere on the
side of the British; to the rebels they were enemies of the old order.
The Muslims, who were eventually blamed for the outbreak more than
the Hindus, had their own grievances. Here, too, the politicians had given
up. But orthodox Islam had long taken exception to the British occupa-
tion, and expressed itself in the militant Wahabi movement. Orthodox
sentiment objected to much in the western innovations. The objection was
more on moral and customary than on doctrinal grounds, for while on
fundamental ideas Islam was nearer to the Christian west than Hinduism,
its horror of innovation and change was greater. The maulvis, unlike the
more subtle Brahmins, kept themselves unspotted from any taint of
western thought and dwelt in a medieval world of scholasticism and
textual disputation. India, for them, was a Dar-ul-harb, or house of war,
where revolt was morally justifiable. Thus, while they did not originate the
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rising, they took greater advantage of it than the Hindu pundits — men
like the Maulvi of Fyzabad — and so incurred the odium of the chief
responsibility for the revolt. In addition to this there was nostalgia for the
empire in which both the British and the Marathas had supplanted them.
Delhi with its Mughal pensionary was its natural centre and that is why
its seizure proved so important a rebel success.
The violence of the British reaction had important consequences and
demands explanation. The cases of Neill in the Ganges valley and Cooper
in the Panjab are only the extreme examples of the incidents which fill the
other side of the medal of mutiny horrors. This spirit was compounded of
shock at such violence from so unexpected a quarter, which induced a
feeling of total insecurity, and fear bred by the sudden awareness of isola-
tion amidst an immense and hostile population. The result of these deeds
on both sides was a scar in Indo-British relations which it needed two
generations to heal.
To sum up, the Mutiny was not inevitable, but it was made possible as
the result of the impact of the west upon traditional India. More caution
might have prevented an explosion until the emotional danger-point had
passed, but nothing could have prevented tension when forces so powerful
and dissimilar met. Conservative India made its protest and then settled
down to come to terms with the new world; in the process a degree of
passion was generated which for many years hindered the growth of
understanding on both sides.
The next twenty years may be described as the heyday of imperialism.
The British government was not only all-powerful but was seen to be so.
It not only possessed the initiative in the world of ideas, but was acknow-
ledged to have it. There seemed to be some justification for the confidence
expressed by Sir W. W. Hunter in the book India of the Queen which he
wrote at the end of this period.
The first points to be noticed are the external effects of the Mutiny. At
first there was a cry of vengeance, taking such forms as the expulsion of
the inhabitants of Delhi from their city and a proposal to demolish the
great mosque of Shah Jahan. When this had been stifled by Canning and
John Lawrence in India backed by the authorities in Britain, the dominant
feeling was ‘never again’. A balanced judgement gradually recovered its
sway. The theme of physical precautions gave place to the theme of
amendment and reform. The lost touch with the people must be restored.
Evidence of the two trends can be seen in most of the early post-mutiny
measures. The Company was abolished and the Crown became suzerain in
India. The army was reorganised, Panjabis, Sikhs, Pathans and Gurkhas
being brought in to replace the Brahmins of the Ganges valley. The
artillery arm was abolished except for some mountain batteries. At the
same time the relationship of the British officers with their men was drawn
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so close that an esprit de corps was established which was carried over
into independence. The proportion of British troops was increased. Com-
munications were improved and in particular the construction of the
railway network was expedited.
The next series of measures showed more clearly the desire to avoid the
mistakes of the past, and the belief that these arose mainly from too great
a disregard of Indian tradition and too little knowledge of the public
mind. The princes had been regarded by Dalhousie as corrupt survivors
of an obsolete age. Their general loyalty during the Mutiny caused
Canning to call them ‘breakwaters in the storm’. Their attitude, in fact,
prolonged their existence for nearly a century. The doctrine of lapse was
given up; states were guaranteed their integrity and given sanads or deeds
of recognition. The policy of ‘subordinate isolation’ under the Company’s
rule became that of subordinate partnership under the Crown. This policy
was steadily pursued and unfolded in obedience to its logic until 1914,
when the outburst of princely loyalty on the outbreak of the first World
War proclaimed its triumphant success. Its essential problem was to
reconcile princely and British-Indian standards of administration. What
had been desirable in subordinates became essential in partners. The solu-
tion was to find a common basic policy and to educate the princes to that
end. The common basis was enlightened despotism. To liberal minds the
difficult word was despotism but for the princes the important one was
enlightenment. They were brought from sixteenth-century India to
eighteenth-century Europe, and the method was encouragement and
western education. They were treated with a new deference and sympathy.
Lord Mayo started the first of the Chiefs’ colleges — Mayo College, Ajmer,
in 1869, and Aitcheson College, Lahore. Lord Ripon restored Mysore to
the old ruling family in 1881. Lord Lytton projected an Indian peerage.
Lord Dufferin created the Imperial Service Corps in which princely cadets
received up-to-date military training. The results were substantial. While
for some princes western culture led to Parisian nights, others, and these
some of the most important, took their ruling duties seriously. By 1905
Maratha Gwalior and Baroda, Rajput Bikanir, with Mysore and Travan-
core in the south, could all claim comparison with British Indian stan-
dards and in some respects had gone beyond them.
The doctrine of religious neutrality was underlined in the Queen’s
Proclamation on taking over the government of India in 1858. It had in
fact never been abandoned but now all appearance of encroachment was
eschewed. Officials kept carefully apart from evangelistic Christian ac-
tivity. The most important effect was a reluctance to interfere in social
matters which continued even when a demand for interference had grown
up in the dynamic westernised class.
The last measure of reform was an attempt to secure closer touch with
Indian opinion. The best official opinion agreed with the most authorita-
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tive Indian voice, that of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, in considering the aloof-
ness of officials from the people and officers from their men as a major
cause of the catastrophe. From this arose the dual policy of Indianisation
of the services and consultation. The first major steps in Indianisation had
been taken by Lord William Bentinck when two grades of judges were
thrown open to Indians. From 1853 Indians were eligible to compete in
the Civil Service examination, though the first Indian entrant, Satyendra
Nath Tagore, did not join till 1863 and conditions prevented more than a
trickle entering by this means. But the judicial services up to High Court
level were opened to Indians and the provincial civil services, from which
one-sixth of the all-India Civil Service came to be recruited, were almost
entirely indianised. The underskin of an indigenous administration thus
began to take shape while the outer sheath remained almost entirely
British. Consultation took the form of the development of legislative
councils. The all-British Legislative Council of 1853 was reformed in 1861
to admit Indians under the guise of non-officials; there were three on the
first Council. Councils were established in Madras and Bombay and
thereafter extended to the other major provinces. These councils had been
described as ‘committees by means of which the executive government
obtained advice and help in legislation They were, in fact, expressions of
the durbar principle of Indian tradition, where the ruler hears the opinions
of his counsellors and then takes his decision. But it was a durbar in
western dress, and this made it easier to insert later within it the western
body of representation and responsibility. The durbar principle received
its final expression in the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. Before then,
however, the principle of representation had been smuggled in, as it were,
by the Indian Councils Act of 1892 under the guise of ‘recommendation
for nomination’ — a procedure by which various public bodies recom-
mended individuals for nomination by the government to the several
Legislative Councils, and the nomination followed immediately.
The Mutiny gave a shock to the whole texture of Anglo-Indian relations.
Not only was there the inevitable post-mortem about its causes, there was a
searching discussion of the ends and means of the British government in
India. British confidence in the superiority of western civilisation and the
inevitability of progress was greater than ever. The inferences of the new
knowledge of Indian art and philosophy and Sanskrit literature had
hardly yet impinged on the general intellectual consciousness. The moral
urge which, together with this confidence, secured the westernising policy
in the i83o’s was no less strong. But there was greater caution in the
implementation of the policy and less optimism about its reception.
Whereas the early reformers thought of the Indians as bound by supersti-
tion, tradition and priestcraft, only awaiting the light of reason to emerge
from darkness, the new generation was inclined to consider them un-
responsive or incorrigible. Only a few could perceive the ferment already
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working within Indian life. A sign of this change of attitude was the
substitution of the durbar method of consultation for the western system
of self-government (proclaimed by Macaulay in 1833 and still accepted by
Dalhousie) as the principle of political development.
The tension between the determination to advance on western lines and
pessimism about the Indian response produced the peculiar features of the
Panjab school of administrators. Dalhousie was its founder and Henry
Lawrence its high priest, but it was John Lawrence who gave it its perma-
nent form. The gospel of hard work and hard living, the devotion to duty,
the fierce zeal for public works had behind them the assumption that the
Indian must be improved even if he would not improve himself. There was
a Loyolan ring about the early Panjab officers — ‘to toil and not to seek for
rest, to labour and not to ask for any reward . . . ’. Since the Indian mind
seemed so largely closed, attention was diverted to the material aspects of
the west in the form of public works. Education formed a bridge between
matter and spirit, since self-interest could be used as a motive for attending
schools of western knowledge. This general attitude was widespread in
India. The formula was: ignore Indian apathy, avoid open clashes with
tradition, press on with public works and education. The general attitude
was that of trustees of an estate who considered themselves likely to be in
charge for the foreseeable future. Many indeed doubted if the ward would
ever be able to take over. It was this attitude, so different from that of
Elphinstone, Bentinck and the 1830 reformers, which the rising class of
Indian nationalist politicians found in control of the administration in the
i88o’s and which raised suspicions in their minds that were not finally
exorcised until 1947.
It is true that the Indian government continued to look for Indian
collaborators with more or less zeal. But they continued to lament that
they could not be found. This was because the government persisted in
looking in the wrong direction. In princely India the education of the
princes had been begun and results began to show. In British India it was
hoped that the same class would come forward. This its members would
not do because they had no entry to the only type of service they were
willing to undertake. They were denied commissions in the army, were
unqualified to sit for the I.C.S. examination in London and had hardly
any opportunities of sitting on public bodies. They were wedded to the old
culture; if western education could not provide at least a utilitarian appeal
they would have none of it. Lord Lytton endeavoured to meet this situa-
tion in 1879 with his Statutory Civil Service to which admission was by
nomination and from which one-sixth of the I.C.S. was to be recruited.
But this, like so many of Lytton’s measures, was imaginative but un-
successful.
The conception of India as an estate to be improved had various
aspects. If it was short-sighted it was honest; if it was matter-of-fact it
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was comprehensive. It embraced both the tenants, as it were, or Indians,
and the landlords or British. In the former case there was the reform of
the finances, carried out by James Wilson and Samuel Laing between
1858 and 1862. India was given a modern financial structure with annual
budgets, income tax and a tariff system. This was followed up in the
1860’s by permission to borrow for public works. Public works was the
religion of the mid-Victorian Indian administrator. The two most notable
achievements were railways and irrigation. In 1857 there were 200 miles
of track open to traffic; by 1880 India possessed an integrated railway
system, the first in Asia; by 1905 the railway mileage was 33,000. Irriga-
tion was well under way before the Mutiny. It was pushed ahead steadily
to the culminating achievement of the Sukkur barrage in Sind. By the
close of the British period one-fifth of the cultivable area was irrigated
land — 32-5 million acres in 1940. A third achievement was the conquest
of famine, whose periodical devastations had been virtually irremediable
for lack of food surpluses and transport facilities. The Orissa famine of
1866 carried off nearly a million lives because the Bengal authorities failed
to act in time. The great famine of 1876-8 was attacked energetically and
gave rise to the Famine Commission of 1880 and the Famine Code of
1883. Thenceforth, until 1943, by the use of railways, sea transport, and a
considered pattern of procedure, famines of food became famines of work.
Famine no longer caused starvation but only loss of agricultural work,
food being provided by government agency. Alongside these public works,
for the reason already mentioned, may be placed education. The land-
marks were the Hunter Commission of 1882 and Curzon’s reform of
Calcutta University. Education was heavily over-weighted at the college
and high-school level at the expense of primary education, but by the end
of the century the country was covered with a network of schools and
universities which were the nurseries of the rising westernised class.
While these measures may be said to have benefited the Indian ‘tenants’,
the British ‘landlords’ were not forgotten. When the Indian trade was
thrown open in 1813 it was expected that private enterprise would
develop the potential Indian market without government assistance. But
it soon became apparent that there were formidable practical obstacles to
such a process in the size of the country and the lack of good communica-
tions. Neither markets nor raw materials could be easily tapped. British
capital available from 1815 onwards found better prospects in Europe
and in the Americas than in India. The Indian trade was left largely to
those already engaged in it, whose capital was the savings of government
servants and their own profits. Not until a series of enabling measures had
dealt with the transport difficulty was there a large-scale development.
The most important of these was railways, which have already been dealt
with. After the Mutiny security combined with the profit motive to pro-
mote their construction and at the same time secured capital in England.
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Between 1855 and 1870 half the total investment of £150 millions of
British capital in India was spent on railways. While the government kept
the planning and ownership of railways in its own hands, it brought in
private promoters for construction and operation. The close-up view of
Indian conditions gained by these people encouraged a realisation of the
possibilities opened up by railways. Railway building was the turning-
point of modem Indian economic development. Upon the hinge of rail-
way reconstruction turned the door of modem Indian industrialism.
Railways attracted capital in the first place and capital then took advan-
tage of the new conditions they created.
The most important industry to be affected was cotton. Cotton goods
from Lancashire (using American cotton) had already mined the old
highly skilled hand-weaving cotton industry. Railways completed this
process by enabling Lancashire goods to penetrate farther inland. But
they also made possible a local mill industry which took shape in western
India; its centres were in Bombay and Ahmadabad and the initiative came
from enterprising Parsis and Hindus. The value of railways here was in
transporting raw cotton from the Deccan to the mills and in distributing
the finished product. The first successful mill was opened in Bombay in
1853; major developments followed the opening of the Empress Mill in
Nagpur in 1 887 by J. N. Tata. Some of the cotton profits were in turn used
by Tata in developing the iron industry. His sons founded the Tata Iron
and Steel Company in Behar in 1907, producing the first iron in 1911 and
steel in 1914. Long before this railways had made possible the large-scale
development of the coal industry. There was prospecting in the time of
Warren Hastings and from 1814 operations were carried on with success;
the output in 1846 was 91,000 tons. Railways made distribution possible
and themselves took one-third of the output. Production reached six
million tons in 1900 and 38 millions in 1938, making India self-supporting
in one of the vital components of heavy industry. Jute was first exported
to Dundee in Scotland in 1838. The loss of Russian supplies during the
Crimean War created a boom which led to the establishment of the Indian
jute industry around Calcutta about 1859. In addition to these there were
the plantation industries, the most important of which were tea and
coffee. At first the Assam tea plant was regarded as a weed and it was only
the difficulty of ousting the Indian plant for the Chinese which led to the
former’s cultivation. From 1850 the industry expanded rapidly. The
10 million pounds of Indian tea imported by Britain in 1869 against ten
times the amount of Chinese tea had grown to 137 million pounds in 1900
against 24 million pounds from China. The career of coffee in the south
was more chequered but nevertheless substantial.
All these activities provided an outlet for British enterprise in various
ways. The cotton and later the iron industry was built up mainly with
Indian capital, but it relied extensively on British managers and techni-
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cians. The coal and plantation industries were entirely British in capital
and management, while in the case of jute the ownership was about half
and half. The gap between the provision of capital in Britain and the sale
of the article in India was supplied by the ‘managing agency’, organisa-
tions which ‘undertook’ for financiers and producers by providing the
necessary local knowledge and facilities. They may be described as local
financial transformers. These again were British.
The scale as well as the nature of these operations was bound to provoke
a reaction in the Indian mind. The widespread assumption that Indians
were looking on in apathy so long as their religious feelings were not
touched was erroneous from the start. None of the activities described,
from teaching English in a college to building bridges or operating coal
mines, could be carried on without skilled Indian assistance. By i860
there was a significant segment of the population committed to the new
era by skill and by employment. Non-involvement was a luxury for the
rich, with the penalty of idleness. The first response came from the quarter
one would naturally expect in India. There was a traditional instinctive
reaction of dislike of the new, which the orthodox always found was
upsetting to caste because it tended to disturb the intricate network of
relationships which the caste system involves. This conservative reaction
found vent in the explosion of the Mutiny. Thereafter Indian society as a
whole realised that in some way it must come to terms with the new world.
The question was, how? There was the group of Bengali intellectuals,
inspired by Derozio and encouraged by the nationalist Hare and the
missionary Duff, who advocated a complete break with the past, to the
point, in some cases, of taking the religion of the west along with its
learning and its science. This died away in the 1840’s but there followed a
series of movements which all aimed, in various ways, at meeting the
western cultural challenge. The Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1 828 by Ram
Mohan Roy, combined a traditional theism with a tincture of Christian
ethics ; the Ary a Samaj, founded in the Panjab in 1 875, was a militant body
which looked back in Protestant fashion to the primitive faith of the Vedas.
Ramkrishna and Vivekananda (whose appearance at the World Congress
of Faiths at Chicago in 1893 was the first overt sign of the vitality of
Indian religious thought) combined the Indian doctrine of realisation with
missionary methods of good works. Amongst the Muslims there were the
Wahabis and other groups who sought renewal through a return to
primitive Islam.
All these groups had a measure of success but none of them captured
the country as a whole. In particular they failed to appeal to more than a
section of the rising westernised class, attached to the new era by training,
occupation and conviction. The reason was that all these movements,
except perhaps the first, looked on things western with a degree of dis-
approval. They could not therefore meet the inner need of the new class,
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for whom some acceptance of the west was a postulate. Their need was for
a reconciliation of old and new, not by excusing the new, but by excusing
the old. This reconciliation was provided by the ideas of the Bengali
thinker Ram Mohan Roy (c. 1770-1833) for the Hindus and by Sir
Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1816-98), founder of the Aligarh College in 1875,
for the Muslims. Both found a connecting link between the respective old
and new systems in the principle of reason which provided a criterion both
for the rejection of old abuses and for the acceptance of new truth. In this
way the new classes could accept the present while avoiding a painful sense
of treason to the past.
One thing they lacked in the new circumstances: a sense of religious
devotion. This came from an unexpected quarter: in the religion of the
secular west — nationalism. Similar emotional needs in different continents
bred similar results. As no Indian nation existed in fact, these classes pro-
ceeded to create one. The genius of men like Bankim Chandra Chatterji
conceived of India as a personality in a way quite different from the past.
A literary figment became a political myth ; the myth in turn generated a
purpose and political programme. This compromise was not permanent,
but it sufficed for the needs of the moment. The new classes lived in two
worlds, traditional patterns prevailing in the private sphere and western
concepts in public life. Sooner or later the one had to impinge on the
other, but the time was not yet. This duality produced many strange
results evoking jibes and sneers from unsympathetic observers. But it was
the embarrassment, not of the man with clothes that won’t fit, but of the
animal in the process of changing its skin. Unknown to the home
authorities, and unperceived by the olympian official class in India itself,
the subordinates who amused them were forming themselves into a
dynamic minority able to take over the country at three generations’
remove.
The last twenty-five years of the period saw the British empire in India
attain the height of its power and prestige. What may be called the period
of imperial India was ushered in by the pageantry of Lytton’s Durbar of
1876, when the Queen was proclaimed Empress, and closed by that of
Lord Curzon in 1902. It had the outward splendour of a late summer’s
afternoon, but to the discerning the shadows were perceptibly lengthening
beyond the glare of the imperial sun. The benevolent despotism of post-
Mutiny India had impressive results to show, but it was beginning to be
challenged. As a system and as a political concept it had reached a dead
end; from creative activity men were increasingly turning to self-admira-
tion. The future lay elsewhere.
At this time India became a centre of party controversy in Britain as it
had not been since the time of Warren Hastings. The issues were foreign
policy, where India was involved in the Russian policy of Disraeli, and
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democratic self-government, which Gladstone accepted as the ultimate
goal of Indian development during his second ministry. The former for a
time made Indian policy a matter of party passion involving the resigna-
tion of two viceroys; the latter made Lord Ripon’s government (1880-4)
the most controversial between Bentinck’s (1828-35) and Lord Irwin’s
(later Halifax) in 1926-31. Both these issues were removed by the mid-
1880’s, the one because the parties in Britain reached tacit agreement on
foreign policy, and the other because the Irish Home Rule split in 1886
and the growth of Liberal imperialism rendered the radical wing of the
Liberal party almost powerless. Ripon was liberal-minded but indecisive;
Dufferin was impressive but apathetic; while Elgin, the last Liberal ap-
pointment of the century, might have belonged to either party or none.
The imperial caravan moved on with its economic and educational
development, its ripening administration, its British-manned higher ser-
vices, its conviction of paternal superiority and of indefinite Indian
tutelage. But the first impression had been made on its stately order and
by its side appeared the first signs of an alternative team of drivers.
Through the mid-century, when faith in an Indian response to western
influence was declining, the ideal of the 1830’s had been kept alive by
radicals and humanitarians like Cobden, Bright and Joseph Hume. But
it was not until Gladstone had entered his more advanced phase that any
attempt was made to realise it. In 1880, at the outset of his second
ministry, two decisions of the greatest import for the future were taken.
One was to commence the development of representative institutions in
India and the other to adopt western models for the purpose. By these
decisions the ‘durbar’ plan of Indian constitutional development was
virtually ruled out. Morley in 1906 and after found that any extension of
the representative principle would have to take a western form because
of the measures already in force. The same decision involved the handing
of the future to the new westernised class because they were the only people
who wanted these forms or in any way understood them. Their imperfect
working of them arose from their imperfect understanding, and their
friction with the government from the contrast between representation
and some degree of democracy below and authoritarianism above. Offi-
cials as a class contrasted the manners and tact of the old classes with the
gaucheries of the new; they still looked in the main for self-government
from above and resented that which began to be forced on them from
below.
Before 1880 there was little municipal self-government except in Bom-
bay. Ripon’s constructive achievement was the creation of local repre-
sentative institutions in the form of municipal committees and district
boards. A half to two-thirds of their numbers were elected by local tax-
payers. They were endowed with considerable powers in the fields of
education, sanitation, public works and health; they had power to levy
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octroi, terminal, property and other duties ; they could elect non-official
chairmen. His successor Dufferin followed this up by proposing the
extension of the elective principle to the provincial and all-India legislative
councils. This was achieved in 1892 (after five years of discussion) by the
Indian Councils Act, under the pseudonym of ‘recommendation for
nomination ’. This Act, though microscopic in its immediate effects, was
important in that it enabled a small group of able new Indians to enter the
national public arena. Once there they formed a focus for Indian atten-
tion and a rallying point for the new Indian public opinion. Once there,
they began by personal contact the conversion of British officials from
the general belief in Ripon’s time that ‘no one but an Englishman can
do anything’. The most distinguished of their number was the Poona
Brahmin Gokhale, who in this way became a national figure.
These measures would have had little effect if there had not been a class
of Indians ready to take advantage of them. In parts of India British
administration had now existed for upwards of a century. Western educa-
tion through the English medium had been developing for nearly fifty
years. Governmental activities had steadily expanded, calling for large
numbers of Indians with some acquaintance with western knowledge and
techniques. The railways, the telegraphs, the public works, the schools
and colleges, the law courts are examples of these. Most of the posts
available were subordinate. But some carried real responsibility, and the
professions like law, teaching and medicine offered independent careers
for qualified persons. There was also a westernised class of monied men
such as the Parsis of Bombay and some of the zamindars of Bengal. These
people, through the fact of a common ideological background and a
common connection with an exotic administration, were developing an
all-India consciousness which found expression in attachment to a still
largely notional Indian nation. Nationalism existed in their minds so it
was necessary to create an Indian nation. The first stage was a demand
for representation which came from the organised groups of Bengal land-
holders. The British India Association put forward the first Indian plan
for a constitution in 1852.
The movement gathered force under the joint stimuli of encouragement
and irritation. Under the first heading came the European discovery of
Sanskrit literature and philosophy, beginning with Sir William Jones’ dis-
covery of the kinship of Sanskrit with other Aryan languages. A long
succession of scholars like Prinsep, Mill, H. H. Wilson, Deussen and Max
Muller made thinking Europeans aware of Sanskrit literature and im-
pressed them with its range and depth. There followed a rediscovery of
Buddhism, of the achievements of the Mauryas and the Guptas, and a
romantic portrayal of the Rajputs by James Tod. Thus Hindu India found
favour in European learned circles just at the moment when the western-
ised Indian was looking for a past to be proud of. This appreciation of
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things Hindu spread, with the work of men like James Fergusson and
Alexander Cunningham, to architecture and later to the arts of sculpture
and painting. While scholars encouraged the new Indian to be proud of
his past, a group of liberal-minded Englishmen encouraged them to be
confident in their future. Men like Sir Evan Cotton, Sir William Wedder-
bum, A. S. Hume and Sir David Yule — the first three of whom were
Presidents of Congress between 1885 and 1900 — encouraged the leaders
of the new class to think in terms of eventual self-government on western
lines. The achievements of their ancestors were a guarantee of the potenti-
alities of their descendants.
Then there was the stimulus of irritation. One source of this was race
feeling and discrimination which tended to grow as the British lost touch
with the aristocrats, whom they had formerly treated as equals, and as the
commercial element among them increased with the growth of British
enterprise. The Mutiny encouraged a process which was already in pro-
gress by adding the emotions of fear and resentment to the predispos-
ing causes. This feeling was more pronounced with the half-educated
westerners, but it was these who had most personal touch with the new
Indians and whose rudeness was the more galling. Too many Europeans
were still looking to the old landed classes for possible colleagues and
resenting the presence of the new educated as an intrusion of upstarts.
The effect of this prejudice on a sensitive people was profound though
difficult to define. It created a climate of opinion in which suspicions and
resentments could easily grow. Its blending with the pre-existing admira-
tion for things western held by this class created that divided mind which
so puzzled so many western observers in the next fifty years.
It was in this mental atmosphere that more specific grievances acquired
a sharper form than might otherwise have been the case. There was the
virtual exclusion of Indians from high executive office, owing to the diffi-
culty of sitting for the I.C.S. examination in London. The lowering of the
age-limit in 1879 was interpreted as a deliberate step to make things more
difficult. In the economic field there was a belief in discrimination in
favour of Lancashire, created by the abolition of the cotton tariff in 1879
and confirmed by the cotton excise of 1895. In the political field there was
resentment at the press restrictions imposed by the Vernacular Press Act
of 1 879 and the use of Indian troops (at Indian expense) in such adventures
as the second Afghan war and their dispatch to Cyprus in 1878. The final
goad was the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which proposed to make Europeans
amenable to certain courts presided over by Indian judges. The outcry of
non-official Europeans, who went to the length of proposing to kidnap the
Viceroy and who were supported covertly by many officials, led the
indecisive Ripon to agree to a compromise which satisfied neither side.
The new Indians felt themselves challenged in the one field of the law
where they had made a considerable advance. It was in these circum-
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stances that, with liberal European support, the Indian National Congress
came to birth in 1885.
During the first few years of its existence the Congress was cautious and
moderate. It was aware of the smallness of its constituency: Lord
Dufferin described its supporters as a ‘microscopic minority’, unaware
that they were, in fact, the creative minority who were to lead the whole
people of India. Nevertheless, it provided an all-India forum for political
discussion, it evolved a representative and democratic machinery, and it
gradually captured the attention of the country. Its annual sessions
became the principal non-official event. In Surendranath Bunnerjea,
G. K. Gokhale and B. G. Tilak it threw up leaders of eminence and, in the
latter, one who was not bound by ties of imitative Gladstonian liberalism.
He experimented with appeals to orthodox sentiment and local Maratha
sentiment on the one hand and with direct action methods on the other.
For a time the Congress supported, if rather gingerly, the reforms of
Curzon, but it was his partition of Bengal in 1905 against popular remon-
strance which turned a middle-class movement into a semi-popular party.
Here was an issue which appealed to every Bengali, which could bring
westernised Indian and Hindu Bengali into passionate understanding.
The public meetings and demonstrations, the boycott of foreign cloth and
the swadeshi movement — which promoted the use of home-made and the
exclusion of foreign goods— and the outer fringe of terrorist activity under
religious sanction made the national movement a popular one in Bengal.
Gandhi was to complete the process for India at large.
While the underskin of the new India was thus developing, the outer
skin of empire was apparently more glossy than ever. Matters of politics
and administration absorbed the civil servants who bemused with their
glitter the historians of the day. Frontier policy, with its Forward school,
led to the delimitation of the Durand Line in 1893 and the tribal cam-
paigns of the end of the century. Famine policy was codified and de-
veloped; the rupee was devalued and education extended. Kipling sang
his Te Deum to the imperial Atlas. This phase of Indian history was
fittingly summed up in the viceroyalty of Lord Curzon from 1898 to 1905.
He had integrity, vigour, imagination and a sense of history. He was
proud of his country as of himself, he served India in his own manner with
unremitting toil. In everything administrative he excelled ; in everything
requiring any understanding he lacked and failed. He could relieve famine
and extend irrigation, build railways and encourage commerce, reorganise
the frontier and overhaul the educational machine, exhort princes and
uphold racial justice. He could preach the gospel of imperial service and
match precept with practice. But he could not understand the working of
the new Indian mind, appreciate its feelings or sympathise with its aspira-
tions. He was unaware that his moral lectures struck Indians as odious,
his dealings with Calcutta University as an attempt to restrict autonomy
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in the one sphere in which Indians enjoyed it in some measure, and his
administratively justified partition of Bengal as an outrage against the
Bengali people and educated India in general. In his insensitiveness as in
his zeal and vigour he was an epitome of the dilemma in which the British
now found themselves. The class which they themselves had created and
then failed to recognise in its real nature was knocking on the door of
power. Seventy years before a fair prospect of this door had been given :
now that Indians came near it was found to be cumbered with the bars of
imperialism, superiority and vested interest.
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CHAPTER XVI
CHINA
T he summer of the year 1870 in China saw two events which taken
together have been recognised as marking the failure of the move-
ment known to Chinese historians as the T’ung Chih Restoration,
the rally of the dynasty which followed the successful suppression of the
great T’ai P’ing Rebellion (1850-64). On 7 July 1870 the British Under-
secretary for Foreign Affairs announced in the House of Commons that
the government had decided not to ratify the Alcock Convention, an
instrument which the British Minister to China, Sir Rutherford Alcock,
and the Chinese plenipotentiaries had signed in Peking on 23 October of
the previous year. On 21 June there had occurred in the treaty port of
Tientsin a violent anti-foreign outbreak, in which several lives were lost,
known as the ‘Tientsin Massacre’. The rejection of the Alcock Convention
marked the failure of the foreign policy associated with the T’ung Chih
Restoration; the Tientsin massacre equally emphasised the triumph of
reactionary forces opposed to the cautious programme of modernisation
which the Restoration statesmen had pursued. Both events were the pro-
duct of popular ill-informed chauvinism, in the one case inspired by the
pretensions and greed of the European merchant community in China, in
the other by the ignorance, pride and xenophobia of the Chinese people.
The British government had yielded against their better judgement to
the clamour raised by the merchants of Shanghai and other ports in
China, an agitation directed not merely against the fact that the stillborn
Alcock Convention made some modest changes in the treaty relations
between the two countries in favour of China, but even more against the
policy which inspired the author of this diplomatic initiative. Alcock
believed that the modernisation of China must be gradual, that the
sweeping reforms which the merchants demanded could not be expected,
and would not be in fact beneficial immediately, and that the Chinese
government was entitled to be treated as an equal in diplomatic negotia-
tions. The abortive Convention which bears his name has been rightly
described as ‘a genuine attempt at treaty revision based on bilateral con-
cessions’. This was the first and for many years the last occasion on which
the Chinese government had freely negotiated an agreement with a
western power on a basis of equality, without being under threat of force
or acting in an atmosphere of crisis.
The Chinese government, for its part, had no hand in the Tientsin
massacre, a tragedy in which the fury of the Tientsin mob had been
exacerbated and provoked by the arrogance and folly of the French
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consul. A government which had in reality made a very real and genuine
attempt to regulate and safeguard the activities of Christian missionaries,
was on the one hand attacked by its own subjects for yielding to the
insensate demands of foreigners, on the other accused of fomenting mob
violence and conniving at cruel atrocities. Those statesmen who on both
sides had sought to build a saner relationship between the two countries
were discouraged and neglected ; those who were more prepared to follow
or accept popular prejudices remained in power. The foreign powers
reverted to policies based on coercion, to ‘gun-boat diplomacy’, the
Chinese government fell into the hands of men who distrusted the western
world and all its works. The promise of the T’ung Chih Restoration was
never fulfilled, and China entered upon a road which led to the distant,
but henceforth almost inevitable, revolution. Rightly or wrongly it is the
conviction of modern Chinese historians that the period 1860-80 was the
last in which China had the opportunity to make those changes and
adjustments which would have led to the modernisation of the country
under the established leadership and avoided the calamities of revolution,
civil war and foreign invasion.
When he died in 1861 the seventh emperor of the Ch’ing, or Manchu
dynasty, I Chu (reign title Hsien Feng) left two principal consorts, the
Empress Tz’u An, who had given birth to no children, and the mother of
his son, Tz’u Hsi, born Yehonala, and later the famous Empress Dowager.
The two empresses were entrusted with certain powers at the emperor’s
death, and retained seals without which no decree was valid. No sooner
was the emperor dead than a dangerous conflict began between the two
empress dowagers and the eight co-regents. In conjunction with I Hsin
Prince Kung, who then controlled the city, the empresses arrested the
co-regents, and, after convicting them of conspiracy to seize power, had
them promptly executed. In this way the young empress dowager, Tz’u
Hsi, then twenty-six, assisted by her retiring and much weaker colleague
Tz’u An, obtained the regency and henceforward for more than forty
years never really relinquished power.
In the period of eleven years covered by the First Regency of the two
empress dowagers, much of the imperial authority was exercised by I Hsin
Prince Kung. Although limited by the narrow background of his educa-
tion and the conservatism of the court. Prince Kung had come to ap-
preciate the need for reforms and cautious modernisation. Thus the
movement known as the Restoration was furthered by the support of the
most powerful member of the imperial family, who in these years guided
and controlled the regency. Nevertheless, neither Prince Kung nor the
great ministers who had risen during the T’ai P’ing rebellion and who were
with few exceptions Chinese, not Manchus, were in any real sense pro-
gressives or modernisers. Their object was to restore the Confucian state,
bring back to the distracted empire the calm assured rule of the traditional
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autocracy working through a hierarchy of classically educated officials
who should be primarily scholars, and not experts in any branch of
administration. Consequently these men looked upon western learning
and technical achievements with caution and doubt. Some of these things
were useful, but the western culture as a whole (in so far as they were aware
that it existed) was incompatible with the Confucian philosophy and the
state system built upon it. It must therefore be kept at arm’s length.
The experiences of a long war had indeed convinced them that some
changes were essential. Modern firearms were, to them, the most useful
and characteristic product of western civilisation. At a very early date in
the Restoration arsenals and shipyards were opened at Shanghai, Nan-
king and Foochow. Having campaigned for years up and down the
Yangtse the great provincial viceroys saw the utility of steamships, but
opposed all suggestions for the building of railways, which they thought
would aid foreign aggressors to penetrate deeply into the country.
Foreign commerce they accepted as a necessary evil, but resisted the
reiterated desire of the foreign merchants to trade and travel freely in any
part of China. Trade must be confined to Treaty Ports, and the Chinese
government never at this period willingly increased the number of these.
Such western diplomats as Sir Rutherford Alcock, who had come to
know the country well, often agreed with the Chinese view of these
matters rather than with that of the merchants. Alcock repeatedly ex-
pressed great doubt whether the ‘opening up of the interior’, to use the
contemporary phrase, would result in any benefit to trade, while he
showed good reasons for fearing that it would lead to riots, murders and
incidents, which he, as much as the Chinese authorities, wished to avoid.
For, contrary to the belief then current among the foreign community,
the persistent and widespread xenophobia of the Chinese people was not
encouraged by the senior imperial officials, although it was shared by the
powerful class of provincial gentry. The main irritant to the mass of the
people was the presence of foreign missionaries and the activities of
Chinese Christian converts. The causes of complaint were both general
and practical. To a people with a very strong sense of social solidarity
welded by centuries of relative isolation and a pervasive and remarkably
comprehensive culture, the preaching of new religion, associated with an
alien culture contradicting many ancient social practices and repudiat-
ing beliefs universally held, was in any case a suspect and provocative
activity. Officials and gentry did not forget that popular rebellions were
also usually inspired and organised by the followers of some esoteric sect
of Buddhism, and the T’ai P’ing rebellion itself had been strongly influ-
enced by the quasi-Christianity of its leaders and founders. Chinese
converts tended to seek the protection of the foreign missionary when in
conflict with their neighbours: their new religion forbade them to join in
the community festivals which the village or trade guild subscribed to. The
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converts refused to pay such dues. They refused, also, to accept the
direction of their unconverted senior relatives in such matters as marriage
and the education of children. They were therefore regarded as subversive
of the family system, the linch-pin of Chinese society.
The educated class, the provincial gentry, whether in or out of office,
objected to the Christian missionaries and converts on rather different
grounds. They saw, dimly perhaps, yet truly, that Christian teaching,
however spiritual and unworldly, was basically subversive of the whole
Chinese culture. It set up a new orthodoxy, other than that of Con-
fucianism. It introduced a new, alien learning, strange to the classical
tradition of China and wholly unfamiliar to those educated in that
arduous school. It was foreign, and preached by foreigners. This last
objection was still felt against Buddhism nearly two thousand years after
it had been introduced to China. It was still thought that Chinese
Muslims, however long assimilated, were of a different race as well as of
a different faith. With these well-established prejudices in mind it was not
easy for a Chinese scholar to accept the Christian converts or approve of
Christian, foreign missionaries. The fact that these missionaries had only
won the right to live and teach in China as a consequence of China’s
defeat in the war of 1839-42, called the Opium War, was never forgotten.
Foreign trade and foreign ways promoted the rise to wealth and influence
of a new class, the city merchants, and especially those among them who
were associated with the foreigners, known to these latter from a Portu-
guese word as ‘compradors’. This new class was also obnoxious to the
provincial gentry, especially since very many of its members were Can-
tonese, coming from the city and province which had a well-established
reputation as being the most subversive, anti-dynastic and troublesome
region in the empire.
Thus the T’ung Chih Restoration was frustrated by the failure of the
rulers of China to grapple decisively with their two greatest problems, the
need to modernise China and thus ward off the threat of foreign aggres-
sion, and the parallel need to give the people that clear leadership which
could have overcome the forces of reaction and bigotry and directed their
energies towards the reconstruction of the country. This failure in China
occurred in the very decades when similar problems confronting Japan
were met by the bold, almost revolutionary, policies adopted by the
Meiji regime; among the great statesmen of the T’ung Chih period were
men at least as able and as patriotic as the Japanese ministers of the
Emperor Meiji, but at the top, at the supreme level of the throne, the
Manchu dynasty was unable in these crucial years to provide a sovereign
with the assured authority of mature age, the intelligence to understand
what had to be done, and the prestige to enforce reform policy.
The dynasty had in any case to overcome a grave handicap, its alien
origin. The Manchu people, although deeply influenced by the civilisation
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CHINA
of China before they conquered the empire, were still a foreign race. They
had set up, at the conquest, a system of government which clearly
revealed their mistrust of their Chinese subjects, and if this system had
become in the course of two centuries smoother in its operation and less
objectionable to the Chinese of the educated class, it still gave to the small
Manchu minority a wholly disproportionate share of power and privilege.
It had already been shown, both in the Opium War against Britain and in
the T’ai P’ing rebellion, that the old Manchu military organisation was use-
less. The dynasty had been saved by loyal Chinese officials commanding
Chinese armies. Yet during the Restoration period and subsequently no
attempt was made to modify the restrictions imposed on Chinese, who
could compete for only half of the civil-service posts, and the Manchu
aristocracy, idle, incompetent and ignorant as they often were, retained
their privileges intact.
The dynasty had been challenged in the T’ai P’ing movement by a rival
which claimed to be liberating China from alien rule. This appeal met
with a profound response in the southern provinces which had resisted
the Manchu conquest for nearly forty years after the submission of the
north. The T’ai P’ing leadership weakened its cause by adopting a form of
Christianity, unfamiliar and unwelcome to the mass of the people and
positively repellent to the provincial gentry, who had therefore rallied to
the dynasty. The T’ai P’ings also made grave military mistakes when
victory was within their reach; their movement had been shaken by
internal dissensions, and had failed to secure the recognition of foreign
powers. Yet it had won the widespread support of the common people of
south China and had, in the earlier period of its power, made genuine and
well-conceived attempts to remedy some of the miseries of the peasants
and reform the Chinese system of government. Its long continuance, its
great local victories, and the support it had received from the people
should have been a pregnant warning to the court. Following victory a
policy of decisive and sweeping reform led and inspired by the throne
could have saved the dynasty, and set the course of Chinese history for a
century. But the throne was occupied by a child and the regency exercised
by women who wholly lacked the vision and the knowledge for such
leadership.
I Hsin Prince Kung was the most capable prince of the imperial family
in its later years. But in a subordinate position, not even having the
powers of regent, the weakness of his character prevented him from
asserting himself, and permitted the steady growth of the power and
ambition of the emperor’s mother, the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi. In
the first years of the regency Prince Kung had held preponderant power;
he held the new title of Prince Counsellor, was head of the newly founded
Tsungli Yamen, the first Chinese ministry of foreign affairs in the empire’s
history, head of the Grand Council (a position equivalent to Prime
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
Minister in some respects), and also commanded the Peking Field Force,
one of the few corps equipped with modem firearms. But in 1865 these
powers were suddenly and seriously diminished. Abruptly dismissed from
all his offices on vague charges, he was by the intercession of the leading
officials of the empire reinstated as head of the Tsungli Yamen and Grand
Council, but not to the rank of Prince Counsellor. Thus the empress
dowager won an important victory, demonstrating that her power as
co-regent was sufficient to overshadow that of the senior prince of the
imperial family.
Throughout the period of the First Regency of the two empress
dowagers, 1861-73, a great part of the empire was still ravaged by the
rebellions which had started in the Hsien Feng reign. The Muslim
rebellion in the north-western provinces continued until 1878, although
the province of Kansu was pacified by the capture of Suchou in 1873. In
effect, therefore, the provinces of China proper, as distinct from such
outer dependencies as Sinkiang, were not completely pacified until the
end of the regency. The long continuing disorder did not encourage the
T’ung Chih statesmen to embark on profound and disturbing reforms,
they sought instead to pacify the provinces and restore the traditional
form of government.
Few of the great officials of the period, however able and conscientious,
had any training in or understanding of economic affairs. They considered
that such specialised knowledge was not desirable in senior officials, but
should be confined to advisers of low rank ; it was a cardinal tenet of the
Confucian system that men trained in commerce and industry could not
be expected to have the pure and lofty principles of the classical scholar.
Few if any of the high officials therefore really learned the lessons of the
great rebellions ; they did not appreciate that the great rise in population
during the long peaceful reigns of K’ang Hsi and Ch’ien Lung in the
previous century had increased pressure on the agricultural land to a point
never before experienced. The least failure of harvests, the occurrence of a
severe flood, was bound to inflict vast misery, while the absence of any
modem communications made it impossible for the most benevolent and
competent government to provide any appreciable relief. The great rebel-
lions had been sparked by the misery resulting from such catastrophes,
the only practical means of guarding against a recurrence was to improve
communications and develop industry. But the building of railways, the
opening of mines and mills were all foreign innovations which they pro-
foundly distrusted.
During the years 1868-70 the British minister in Peking and the officials
of the Tsungli Yamen headed by Prince Kung were negotiating a revision
of the Treaty of Tientsin and Convention of Peking, instruments which
had brought the ‘Arrow War’ to an end in i860. Both sides realised that
these treaties did not meet the actual situation and the negotiations for
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CHINA
their revision were welcome to both. Unfortunately, whereas Alcock and
the British government understood that concessions should be made to
China and that real and lasting advantages would accrue from a treaty
freely negotiated and signed by the Chinese government without threat of
force, the China merchants of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong saw
nothing but an opportunity for obtaining fresh advantages and extended
privileges. Alcock was constantly and violently criticised in the European
press in China, and his opponents did not fail to drum up opposition at
home. The Chinese negotiators, subjected for their part to the criticisms
of the reactionary party, and disturbed at the rising clamour of the foreign
press in China, showed themselves very anxious to sign a treaty which,
although conceding far less than they had hoped for, yet made some
valuable adjustments, and at least admitted the right of China to an equal
status. The Convention was signed in Peking on 23 October 1869. The
Chinese, not yet fully aware of all the niceties of western diplomacy,
formed the mistaken impression that this act was binding, since it had been
sealed with the emperor’s seal, that of Prince Kung and those of four of
the senior ministers. When several months later, in June and July 1870, it
became clear that the British government, bowing to the clamour of com-
mercial interests in China and at home, would not ratify, the Toss of face’
suffered by Prince Kung was serious, and gave great satisfaction to his
opponents.
Among these, although still covertly, had to be reckoned the Empress
Dowager Tz’u Hsi, mother of the emperor (then fifteen years old) and still
co-regent. For some years past friction between the empress dowager and
the prince had been growing; in 1869 an incident occurred which caused
open enmity. Prince Kung tried to check the power of the empress
dowager by summarily removing her favourite eunuch, an action which
inflicted on her that ‘ loss of face ’ which was so serious a matter for the
Chinese of that period. She had her revenge when the British refused to
ratify the Convention which Prince Kung had negotiated and sealed.
At the very time when this refusal of ratification was about to be
announced there occurred an incident which further embarrassed the
prince who was responsible for the foreign relations of the empire.
Following the ‘Arrow War’ the French had occupied Tientsin in i860,
and did not evacuate the city and foreign concession until 1863. The
inevitable quarrels between foreign soldiery and the populace had led to
much ill feeling. The French had also established their consulate in a
former imperial villa, and built a cathedral on the razed site of a Chinese
temple, all of which had given offence to the local gentry. The populace
was at the same time, particularly in the summer of 1870, roused by a
number of kidnapping cases, which were attributed to the French Sisters
of Charity. These nuns had undertaken the charitable work of rescuing
abandoned children, and had further, and most unwisely, offered small
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rewards for such children if brought alive to the convent. Kidnappers
were thus encouraged to snatch children and obtain a reward. An epi-
demic, common enough in summer, was raging and there were many
deaths among the children in the orphanage. Upon these facts becoming
known the population was roused to fury and being further provoked by
the unwise and violent behaviour of Fontanier, the French consul, killed
him, two French priests, ten Sisters of Charity and a number of their
Chinese servants. The church, convent and other premises were burnt and
sacked.
This event, the Tientsin massacre of 21 June 1870, became a landmark
in the relations between China and the western nations on the one hand,
and on the other in the internal development of the policy of the court.
Only the fact that France and Prussia went to war that year prevented a
Sino-French war; all initiatives for further treaty revision came to an end,
while China was forced, to avoid a conflict, to send Ch’ung Hou, a high
Manchu official, on a mission to France to convey an apology for the
murder of Fontanier to the French government. Since the envoy himself
had narrowly escaped being shot by the consul, it was not unnaturally felt
by the Chinese that this mission was a weak surrender to foreign threats
and violence. The memory of the Tientsin massacre lasted long, and em-
bittered both sides. It may be said to linger yet, for the charges of
kidnapping and neglecting children in orphanages were persistently main-
tained through the years, revived by the Boxers, and (in respect of the
charge of neglect) endorsed by the present government of China.
There can be little doubt that the two events of the summer of 1870, the
rejection of the Alcock Convention by the British government, the
Tientsin massacre and its consequences, did much to strengthen the party
of reaction in China and diminish the influence of men such as I Hsin
Prince Kung. The concurrent rise to power of the empress dowager pro-
vided for the reactionary party a leader who shared their prejudices and
was by her sex and situation inhibited from gaining that wider knowledge
of the world which the officials of the Tsungli Yamen and the provincial
viceroys were beginning to acquire.
In 1871 the emperor, whose personal name was Tsai Ch’un, reign title
T’ung Chih, was sixteen years old, and by dynastic custom of an age to
govern. None the less a petition was organised to implore the empress
dowagers to continue the regency for two more years. The complacent
acceptance of this violation of the dynastic laws by the court was an
ominous indication of the ascendancy which the Empress Dowager Tz’u
Hsi had acquired. The next year the young emperor was married to a lady
of rank, and his majority formally declared on 3 February 1873. The
co-regents resigned, but in fact the empress mother, Tz’u Hsi, continued
to dominate the government and her own weakling son.
Outwardly the year of the T’ung Chih emperor’s majority seemed
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auspicious enough. The Muslim rebels in Yunnan had been finally sup-
pressed, Tso Tsung-t’ang recovered the city of Suchou and drove the
north-western Muslim rebels out of China proper. On 29 June the
emperor accorded the first audience to the ministers of the foreign powers
at which the k'o t'ou (the prostration before the throne) was, in accordance
with treaty provisions, dispensed with. But to those who knew what was
passing in the palace the situation cannot have seemed promising. The
emperor was weak physically, idle and dissipated. He succumbed rapidly
to the temptations which corrupt eunuchs put in his way, he disliked and
quarrelled with his formidable mother. He had chosen for his consort a
girl, daughter of a Mongol high official, of whom his mother disapproved.
He quarrelled, too, with his uncle I Hsin Prince Kung because the latter
reproved him for extravagance and loose conduct. In November 1874 the
emperor contracted smallpox, a disease then very common in China, and
regarded as an inevitable ailment of youth. Tsai Ch’un, with his weak
constitution, did not throw off the disease, and on 18 December his con-
tinued illness gave the empress dowagers an excuse to resume the regency.
On 12 January 1875 the T’ung Chih reign ended with the young emperor’s
death, aged nineteen. He left no son. Thus within less than two years the
hope of mature leadership and an adult sovereign was destroyed, and a
dynastic succession crisis of a most dangerous character arose.
The Ch’ing (Manchu) dynasty had adopted a rule of succession which
differed in one important respect from that which had obtained under
earlier, Chinese, dynasties. To avoid the intrigues which had too often
surrounded the person of a crown prince, it had been decided that the
emperor should write the name of the son he chose to be his successor on
a paper which was kept secret until the sovereign was in extremis. In the
event of the emperor having no son he should choose a successor from the
generation lower than his own, a nephew, who could then be officially
adopted as his son, and so enabled to perform the ancestral rites to the
spirit of the departed sovereign, which a brother or cousin of the same
generation could not do, since such a person could not stand in the son-
father relationship. In actual practice no such necessity had ever arisen as
the first seven emperors of the dynasty had all left sons, one of whom had
been nominated as heir. The late Emperor Tsai Ch’un (T’ung Chih), the
first of the dynasty to leave no son to succeed him, had also been the
only surviving son of the Hsien Feng emperor, and consequently had no
nephews. The only possible heirs must be found among the great grand-
sons of the Tao Kuang emperor, who had died in 1851. This meant that
the only possible candidate was Prince P’u Lun, then a child, the eldest
son of Prince Tsai Chih. But there was here a further difficulty ; Tsai Chih
himself was not a grandson of the Tao Kuang emperor, but only the
adopted son of that emperor’s eldest son, I Wei. Tsai Chih was by blood
only the great-great-grandson of the Ch’ien Lung emperor, who had died
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in 1799. The Tao Kuang emperor had several grandsons, the children of
his five younger sons, but these, all young children at this time, were of
course of the same generation as the late emperor, and thus, on a strict
construction of the succession law, ineligible.
The late emperor’s consort was at this time pregnant; some of the
Grand Council therefore proposed that a regency be established until it
was seen whether she gave birth to a son who could then be proclaimed
emperor at birth. The Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi was not at all in favour
of this proposal. If her daughter-in-law did in fact have a son, it would be
she, not Tz’u Hsi, who would be the regent through the long minority of
such an infant, and Tz’u Hsi greatly disliked her daughter-in-law. Under
these circumstances she would have no further standing in the govern-
ment and would be forced into retirement. She therefore declared that the
situation of the empire was too serious to permit a vacancy of the throne,
and that an heir must be chosen at once. Prince P’u Lun was then pro-
posed, but the empress dowager at once objected that as his father was
only the adopted son of I Wei he could not be considered to be a real heir.
This view had no foundation in custom or law, for in China adoption is
regarded as constituting a definite and binding relationship. If P’u Lun
was to be set aside there remained only the first cousins of the late
emperor, and of these the eldest was Tsai Ying, son of I Hsin Prince Kung,
then fourteen years old. If he became emperor his minority would be
very short, and his father Prince Kung, would be the obvious choice for
regent. But the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi had no great love for Prince
Kung, and knew very well that his regency would be the end of her power.
She therefore proposed Tsai T’ien, then four years old, the son of
I Huan Prince Ch’un, seventh son of the Tao Kuang emperor, and
younger brother of I Hsin Prince Kung. I Huan’s wife, however, was the
younger sister of Tz’u Hsi herself, thus Tsai T’ien was her nephew. He
was therefore the only member of the imperial family closely related to
the empress dowager, his mother was her sister, and she could be assured
of the regency for many years yet. The child’s father, I Huan, was a weak
character lacking the ability of I Hsin Prince Kung. If the latter prince
had had more real strength of will, if his prestige had not recently been
dimmed by the failures in foreign affairs, he might have resisted this
usurpation, which it is known he greatly resented. He yielded to the
ambitions of the empress dowager, supported as they were by the syco-
phantic majority of the Grand Council. In this way, by an open and
flagrant violation of the law of succession the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi
secured a further long lease of power, with consequences which were in
the end fatal to the dynasty.
Tsai T’ien was chosen; the two empress dowagers were proclaimed
co-regents once more ; the consort of the late emperor wholly thrust aside.
A few weeks later she died suddenly, as it is said by taking her own life in
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protest against the usurpation. It is at least obvious that this demise was
very convenient to the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi, since the birth of a
posthumous son to the Tung Chih emperor would have been a great
obstacle to her ambitions. For the next fourteen years those ambitions
were to have full rein. The co-regent, the Empress Dowager Tz’u An,
died, after a very short illness, on 7 April 1881. Popular tradition has
always maintained that she was poisoned by orders of Tz’u Hsi. The death
of Tz’u An weakened the position of I Hsin Prince Kung, and prepared
the way for his fall.
During the early years of the Kuang Hsii period, under the regency of
the two empress dowagers, foreign affairs had continued to be the main
problem of the government. The last stage of the internal pacification of
the rebellions of the previous decade was completed in 1878 by the final
conquest of the Muslim rebels in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan. This
event, however, involved the court in a new foreign question of a dangerous
character. In 1870, when the rebels were still in full control of Sinkiang,
where Yakub of Kokand emerged as the principal leader, and also much
of north-west China, Russia had occupied the Ili region of Sinkiang, in
order to protect her traders. After a full ten years of foreign occupation it
seemed at least doubtful whether China could now recover this territory.
Ch’ung Hou, who as a consequence of his part in the Tientsin massacre
had been sent on a mission to France, was at that time the only high
Chinese official with any direct experience of foreign countries. He was
sent to Russia in 1879 to negotiate for the return of Ili.
Ch’ung Hou, after opening negotiations in St Petersburg, followed the
Russian court to Livadia on the Black Sea, where on 2 October 1879 he
signed the Treaty of Livadia. This provided for the Russian evacuation of
one-third of the occupied territory and the payment by China to Russia of
a large indemnity, with various trade concessions which also favoured
Russia. The treaty was violently denounced in China by many senior
officials, prominent among whom was a rising man of brilliant talents,
Chang Chih-tung. Largely as a result of his scathing criticism Ch’ung
Hou was dismissed and imprisoned, the treaty denounced, and the life of
the unlucky envoy spared only upon the intercession of the foreign
ministers, who were naturally loath to see the failure of a diplomatic
mission punished with the death penalty. The party of reaction claimed
great credit for the denunciation of the Treaty of Livadia, but the more
favourable terms obtained from Russia by Tseng Chi-tse, in the Treaty of
St Petersburg (24 February 1881) were really due to the skill of this envoy.
Although he agreed to increase the sum paid to Russia to recompense her
‘ occupation expenses ’ he was able to recover a much larger part of the
disputed territory including the strategic passes between Ili and Kashgar.
Against the relative success of these negotiations with Russia, by which
lost territory was recovered and a threatened war averted, must be set the
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deterioration of relations with Britain, an outcome of the murder of a
British subject, A. R. Margary, on 19 February 1875. Margary had made
an overland journey from Shanghai, across south-west China to Bhamo
in Burma, where he met a British trade mission which had the task of
exploring and opening up a new route for trade between lower Burma,
then already annexed by Britain, and the Chinese south-western province
of Yunnan. On his way back into China, a little in advance of the British
mission, Margary was attacked and murdered in the jungles on the
Chinese side of the Burma-Yunnan frontier. The country was (and is) very
wild, and the area had been recovered from the Muslim rebels only two
years before. During the rebellion a British trade mission had been
received by the rebel authorities, but prevented from proceeding farther
by imperial troops. There was thus a local prejudice against the British,
whose penetration of Burma was at this time rapidly extending. Sir
Thomas Wade, the British Minister to Peking, and western opinion
generally, attributed the responsibility for the murder of Margary to the
governor of the province, Ts’en Yu-ying. Wade demanded an investiga-
tion by Chinese and British officials on the spot and the punishment of
those responsible. The court called upon Ts’en for a report, but Yunnan
was 2000 miles away and neither the request nor the reply could be
received for months. In the meantime Wade pressed his demands, left
Peking for Shanghai, and threatened war. When Ts’en’s report was
received it confirmed the Chinese belief that Margary had been murdered
by local bandits and discharged soldiery. Ts’en Yu-ying was in no way
responsible. Wade refused to accept this report; the Chinese government
was equally unwilling to victimise a very high official who had performed
most valuable services to the throne and who was certainly in no way to
blame.
To dismiss this loyal, able, popular and powerful man at the bidding of
foreigners would have been to invite a further and very dangerous rebel-
lion and would have ruined the prestige of the court in the provinces.
Rather than take such action Prince Kung advised that the British be
bought off by other concessions. The Margary Affair was therefore
settled by Li Hung-chang who negotiated with Wade the Chefoo Con-
vention, 13 September 1876, which conceded the opening of further
Treaty Ports, gave further trade concessions, and settled the rules of pro-
cedure for the reception of foreign envoys. Incidents such as the Margary
Affair, where the Chinese court was forced to make concessions to foreign
powers under threat of war, for minor causes, for which the senior
officials of the empire were blamed, but were not responsible, did much to
diminish the authority of liberal officials and inflame the anti-foreign
feelings of the people and provincial gentry.
The declining power of the dynasty was to be revealed still more clearly
in the years between 1881, when Tz’u Hsi became sole regent, and the
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majority of the Kuang Hsii emperor in 1889. If the empire was now
internally at last peaceful, China’s position in her outer dependencies was
challenged by French encroachment in the south and the rising power of
Japan in the north. For many centuries China had exercised a light
suzerainty over the two neighbouring kingdoms which had adopted most
thoroughly the Chinese civilisation, Annam in the south, Korea in the
north. Both had, in the distant past, been provinces of the Chinese
empire under the Han dynasty. In later centuries both kingdoms had
established their local independence, but had acknowledged the supremacy
of the Chinese emperor, no matter what dynasty came to power in China.
The Manchus had succeeded to this suzerainty when they ousted the
Ming. But if China exacted only a nominal, ceremonial, tribute, and left
the Korean and Annamite kings to govern as they pleased, she also pro-
vided no protection, stationed no forces, and had no normal system of
defensive alliance with her tributaries. If attacked they would call on
the emperor for his aid ; it was nowhere laid down whether he in turn was
bound to afford it, or what form it should take. In the early i88o’s this
ancient relationship was to be challenged, and later overthrown, by the
aggressive policies of western imperialism, aptly imitated by Japan.
As early as 1862, when China, distracted by the T’ai P’ing rebellion and
the ‘Arrow War’, was in no position to intervene, France had compelled
the king of Annam (see footnote, p. 644) to cede the three southern
provinces of his kingdom, known as Cochin-China, including the im-
portant city of Saigon. After the Franco-Prussian War France resumed
her forward policy in Annam, and in 1874 secured further rights, among
them that of navigating the Red River in Tongking. China refused to
yield her suzerainty or to admit French trade into the neighbouring pro-
vince of Yunnan. But in 1882 France resumed her pressure, and in April
of that year an expeditionary force occupied Hanoi, capital of Tongking,
and the northern capital of the kingdom. The Annamite king did not dare
to appeal openly to China, and the Chinese government, unwilling to
intervene and bring on war with France, resorted to encouraging the
resistance of local Tongking patriots organised in a force known as the
Black Flag army commanded by an ex-bandit named Liu Yung-fu. The
pattern of Chinese assistance to Annamite opposition to France in 1882
thus foreshadowed very closely the manner in which seventy years later
China was to support the cause of the Viet Minh movement to regain
independence from France. By the middle of 1883, despite the Li-
Fournier Agreement by which China agreed to open the Kuangsi and
Yunnan provinces to French trade, the situation had degenerated into
war between China and France. By the middle of 1884 the Chinese forces
had met with several reverses and China’s coasts were threatened by the
French fleet. 1
1 Below, pp. 650-2, for further details.
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The empress dowager had for a long time sought an opportunity to rid
herself of the competition for power exercised by I Hsin Prince Kung.
She now availed herself of the criticisms which several censors of the war
party made concerning the inept conduct of the war, and dismissed not
only Prince Kung but the entire Grand Council. This change was accepted
without protest; it marked the final ascendancy of the empress dowager.
As successor to Prince Kung in the post of head of the Tsungli Yamen,
the ministry of foreign affairs, the empress dowager chose I K’uang Prince
Ch’ing, a great-grandson of the Emperor Ch’ien Lung and the head of one
of the collateral branches of the imperial family. Prince Ch’ing was a man
of much less talent than I Hsin. He had to some extent a liberal outlook,
but invariably gave way to the empress dowager, avoided, so far as he
could, involvement in any dangerous issue, and was personally well
known to be corrupt and engaged in the lucrative traffic in appointments.
This man, then forty-eight, became and remained the chief minister of the
empire until the fall of the dynasty. I Hsin had been weak; I K’uang was
negligible as a check on the power of the empress dowager; the succession
of I K’uang to I Hsin marks a long step downward in the decline of the
Ch’ing dynasty.
Meanwhile, although Prince Kung had been dismissed for allegedly
bungling the war, the Chinese continued to put up a more creditable
resistance to the French than they had done either in the ‘Arrow War’
against the French and English twenty years earlier, or were to offer to
Japanese attacks ten years later. Nevertheless, and in spite of a Chinese
victory in Tongking, peace negotiations were reopened through the media-
tion of Sir Robert Hart, the British head of the Chinese Maritime
Customs, and were founded upon the abortive Li-Fournier convention of
1883. Peace was signed on 4 April 1885, and China evacuated Tongking
and renounced her suzerainty over Annam. This result was certainly para-
doxical; Li Hung-chang’s concessions, repudiated by the war party two
years before, were now accepted after the policy of that party had un-
expectedly been crowned with more success than could reasonably have
been expected. One reason for this decision was the danger of a spreading
war with France, but perhaps the main cause was the fact that during the
same years as the French war, China had had to cope with an equally
dangerous crisis at the other end of the empire, in Korea. Li Hung-chang
and other high officials were convinced that even if it was possible to win
some victories against the French, China could not hope to conduct
successful war both with France and Japan at the same time.
Just as the first cause of French expansion into northern Annam had
come from China’s failure to support her tributary, Annam, in resisting
French encroachment in Cochin-China, so it was China’s indifference to
Korean affairs which now led to Japanese intervention in that country.
In 1875 Japan had a dispute with Korea over the treatment of shipwrecked
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sailors, unfortunates whom the Korean coastal population despoiled and
ill-treated. China had declined to take any responsibility for Korean
behaviour, and in the next year, 23 July 1876, Japan had come to a direct
settlement with the Korean king. This instrument impaired China’s claim
to suzerainty and weakened her status in the peninsula kingdom. On the
other hand, when the internal condition of Korea deteriorated in the next
few years Chinese as well as Japanese troops were sent to restore order;
and in December 1884, after an engagement between the Chinese and
Japanese forces, the Japanese were compelled to withdraw, and the
Chinese remained in possession of Seoul. 1
There was thus a real possibility, early in 1885, that the French,
repulsed in Tongking, and the Japanese, driven out of Seoul, would form
an alliance against China. The danger was averted by the peace signed
with France in April and in the same month Li Hung-chang and Prince
Ito met in Tientsin and there concluded a convention by which both sides
agreed to withdraw their troops from Korea, and not to send forces into
that country without prior notification to the other power. If China
avoided, for a while, the loss of all her suzerain rights in Korea, she had in
practice conceded to Japan an equal status in that country, an uneasy
settlement containing the seeds of further conflict. Unrest in Korea con-
tinued for the next eight years until a further crisis brought on the Sino-
Japanese War in 1894.
In 1886 the young emperor attained his sixteenth year, and was then of
age to assume the government in accordance with dynastic law and the
august precedent of the great K’ang Hsi emperor, who had also succeeded
to the throne as a minor. Tsai T’ien, the Kuang Hsu emperor, was a
promising youth; intelligent, reflective and sober in his habits and life.
Unlike his immediate predecessors this penultimate emperor of the Ch’ing
dynasty was capable of developing into a competent and liberal-minded
ruler. The empress dowager was no doubt well aware of the character of
her nephew, and already disappointed with her choice. Instead of termi-
nating the regency the whole court, led by the weak father of the emperor,
I Huan Prince Ch’un, petitioned the empress to continue as regent for two
more years. She graciously consented.
In 1889 the emperor’s majority could no longer be postponed; on
26 February he was married to a lady who was the niece of Tz’u Hsi, a
consort for whom he never felt any affection, and who throughout her life
acted as her aunt’s spy upon him. On 4 March, having thus secured her
influence, the empress dowager formally retired to the summer palace
near Peking, although she continued to see all decrees and approve those
of importance before they were issued. The empress dowager had no
intention of living henceforth in obscurity; indeed she was not satisfied
with the disrepair in which the remains of the original summer palace had
1 See ch. xxnr.
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been left since its partial destruction by the British in i860. She required
that it be renovated and rebuilt, and when other funds were not available,
she appropriated the money which had been raised to build and equip a
modem navy to replace and expand the fleet destroyed in the French war.
The emperor and his ministers, even his own father Prince Ch’un, who
had shown especial and genuine interest in the navy, were unable to
prevent this malversation.
It was during this period of the Kuang Hsu emperor’s partial emancipa-
tion that there developed in China an important and growing divergence
between the officials from the south of China and those from the north,
with whom the Manchu officials usually combined. The danger of such a
quarrel had long existed. The dynasty was not only established in Peking,
in the far north, which therefore benefited from the patronage of the court,
but it had from the first been more acceptable to the northern Chinese,
and much less so to those of the south. So long as southern discontent
was openly subversive it could be crushed, and exercised no influence on
the government. But from the T’ai P’ing rebellion onwards, when the
dynasty had owed its survival to southern troops and southern leaders such
as Tseng Kuo-fan and Tso Tsung-t’ang, both from Hunan, southern officials
loyal to the throne became more influential and began to advocate a more
liberal policy than appealed to the Manchu princes and their northern
Chinese colleagues. There was, on the whole, a preponderance of ability
among the southern men, natives of the wealthy and cultured provinces of
Kiangsu, Chekiang, Anhui, Hupei and Hunan; these regions were also
more in touch with the western foreigners, and if these were equally dis-
liked in the south, their inventions, their customs and their power were
better understood.
Gradually there formed in the Grand Council two parties : the liberals,
or more truly cautious modernisers, led by the emperor’s tutor Weng
T’ung-ho, and the reactionaries, led by Hsii T’ung and Kang I, the latter
a Manchu and a fanatical xenophobe. Weng T’ung-ho and his following
were southerners, Hsii T’ung and the other reactionaries from the north.
The southern party were supported by the tacit backing of most of the
great viceroys of the south: Chang Chih-tung, who ruled the twin pro-
vinces of Hunan and Hupei in the middle Yangtse, Liu K’un-i who for
many years held the corresponding position in the lower Yangtse over
Kiangsu, Kiangsi and Anhui, while Li Hung-chang, though not in charge
at this time of any southern province, was certainly the leader of the
modernising group of high officials.
This group had scored some successes; since the 1880’s they had
gradually broken down the prejudice against the building of railways, on
which a slight start was made in 1881 with a line from the coal-mining
town of T’angshan to Tientsin. Telegraph lines had been set up con-
necting all the major cities with Peking and each other from 1884.
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Following the French war a military academy to train officers and men on
modem lines was set up by Li Hung-chang at Tientsin in 1885. From this
establishment there emerged all the officers who in the later years of the
dynasty and early Republic dominated, disastrously, the civil government
of China. The railway was extended from Tientsin to Peking and work
was begun on the great line from Peking to the south (the Peking-
Hankow-Canton railway of later years) in 1898. This project was the
special interest of Chang Chih-tung, the viceroy of Hunan-Hupei, who
conceived and fostered it.
Unfortunately for the policy of cautious modernisation which was the
best that could now gain sufficient support to be practicable, events out-
side China were moving much faster than the most enlightened official
was prepared to go. Japan, her own policy of modernisation a proven
success, was ready for expansion, and fearful of Russian ambition in the
distracted kingdom of Korea. In 1893 the outbreak of another fanatically
anti-foreign rebellion in Korea, the Tong Hak movement, precipitated the
Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5. The war was lost by March 1895 ; and it was
obvious that China would be unable to prevent the Japanese advancing to
Peking itself. Li Hung-chang was sent to Japan to obtain an armistice.
Peace was signed on 17 April. Li had already enlisted the assistance of
Germany, Russia and France in order to curb Japanese ambitions; on
23 April the promised intervention took place and these three powers
insisted, by joint representations to Japan, that the clause in the treaty
giving Japan the lease of the Liaotung peninsula, which included Lushun
(Port Arthur) and Talienwan (Dairen), should be waived. By this supreme
example of the current Chinese foreign policy of ‘playing off one bar-
barian against another’ Li Hung-chang averted, for the moment, the loss
of further territory. But suzerainty over Korea was gone; new privileges
for Japanese traders, a heavy indemnity, were in themselves sufficient loss
of face; and the cession of Formosa, indubitably a part of the territory of
the empire itself, sowed the seeds for a continuing cause of conflict which
still troubles the Far East. 1
The indirect consequences of this disastrous war were even more serious.
China had now been shown to the world as an impotent, decadent empire,
more ‘sick’ in east Asia than the famous ‘Sick Man of Europe’. The
unedifying episode known as the ‘Battle for the Concessions’ swiftly
followed. It was now assumed as proved that the dissolution of the
empire was at hand; every foreign power determined to carve itself a share
of the prize; China was, to use the Chinese phrase, about to be ‘melon-
divided’ — suffer a piecemeal partition and multiple annexations. Within
two months of the end of the Sino-Japanese War the scramble was
beginning, within two years the western powers were in full cry upon
their quarry. 2
1 Below, pp. 655-7, for further details. * Below, pp. 658 ff. for details.
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In answer to this surge of foreign encroachment the Chinese, both
court and country, responded in their own fashion. In 1898, while the
foreign powers were openly talking of their spheres of influence and taking
the initial steps to stake out these future colonies, the emperor, advised by
liberals and southern ministers, embarked on a last desperate attempt to
reform and modernise the country; the people, still inspired by their
ancient pride and xenophobia, rallied to a sect which, drawing upon an
ancient popular tradition, promised its followers immunity in battle if
they rejected every foreign influence, object and practice. In the same
year, 1898, that the Kuang Hsu emperor embarked upon the reform
movement known as the Hundred Days Reform, the Boxer sect arose in
the province of Shantung, where foreign pressure was currently most
acute.
After the event, when the reform movement had failed, many foreign
writers poured scorn on its measures, which were described as brash, ill-
considered, headlong, and premature. But fifty years later the reform
programme appears, on the contrary, as the very minimum which could
have been applied to the desperate plight of the nation and dynasty. The
Kuang Hsii emperor deserves the credit of realising what that plight was
and being prepared to run the enormous risk of alienating the conserva-
tive forces, including his formidable aunt, in a last attempt to save the
throne. All of the reforms proclaimed in the imperial decrees which were
issued in June, July and August of 1898 were to be adopted before many
years had passed, and far more sweeping innovations have been accepted
with enthusiasm by the Chinese people in later years.
The principal reforms announced were as follows :
1. The abolition of the traditional form of civil service examination by writing
stylised essays in classical Chinese.
2. The establishment of an imperial university.
3. The modernisation of the army.
4. Modernisation of the provincial school system.
5. Secularisation of superfluous temples and Buddhist monasteries.
6. Inauguration of a special economic examination.
7. Permission for junior officials and the common people to memorialise the
throne directly.
8. Provision for sending students to study abroad.
9. Establishment of a National Board to promote commerce, agriculture,
mining and the construction of railways.
10. Reform of the provincial administration, abolition of sinecure ministries and
obsolete posts.
This programme was uneven and uncoordinated in the brief period in
which it operated, but some at least of these reforms, such as the ninth,
contained the germ of the idea of a planned programme of national
development which has in modern times transformed the economy of
China.
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It is not certain whether the empress dowager, nominally in retreat at
the summer palace, was from the first determined to suppress the reforms
and deprive her nephew of power, or whether she was prepared to see how
far he would go before taking action. However she did, at the very begin-
ning of the movement, strike one decisive blow which was no doubt
intended to make subsequent reaction easy when the time came. On
15 June, only four days after the issue of the first reform decree, Weng
T’ung-ho, the emperor’s most trusted adviser and an inspirer of the
reform programme, was dismissed from all his posts and retired to the
country. The fact that the emperor was unable to prevent this action
shows the very real limitations of his authority when it ran counter to the
will of his aunt. Without Weng and the prestige which his age, rank and
accomplishments conferred upon the reform programme, the emperor
and his young, idealistic supporters, K’ang Yu-wei, T’an Ssu-t’ung, and
Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, were left isolated at court, exposed to the ceaseless
opposition of the entrenched reactionary party, now increasingly alarmed
at the trend of events.
Although all the principal reformers were distinguished scholars, and
brilliant minds, none at that time had had any experience of administra-
tion or occupied senior posts in the civil service. Their sudden rise and
influence was therefore very unwelcome to the regular officials who, even
if liberal in outlook, were still jealous of their rank and privilege. If the
emperor could have called to his side some leading moderate among the
senior officials, Chang Chih-tung or Li Hung-chang, it is possible that he
might have formed a party strong enough to dominate and outface the
reactionaries. He did not do so, and the attitude of the great provincial
viceroys was ambiguous. Li was still under the shadow of his recent
failures in foreign affairs, the disastrous consequences of the Japanese war
which he had always opposed. Chang played a peculiar role; at first sup-
porting the reforms with his pen, but refraining from active political
support, possibly because, warned by the dismissal of Weng T’ung-ho, he
shrewdly realised that reaction was still potent and apt to triumph. Liu
K’un-i, viceroy of the Lower Yangtse provinces with his seat at Nanking,
a post he had occupied for twenty years, took no part in court politics.
He was almost the last of the T’ung Chih great officials — loyal, competent,
moderate — but no reformer in the manner of K’ang Yu-wei.
Early in September 1898, a bare three months after the issue of the first
reform decrees, the emperor became aware that he was menaced by a
reactionary coup d'etat , inspired by the empress dowager. Urged on by
the more conservative princes and Manchu nobles, backed by such
Chinese as Hsu T’ung, Tz’u Hsi had decided that the reform programme
must be halted, and this could only be done by virtually deposing the
emperor. He was due to pay a first visit by railway to Tientsin, an innova-
tion in itself obnoxious to the reactionaries. It was planned to seize him
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when out of the capital and place the government once more under the
regency of the empress dowager.
The emperor decided that he must forestall this coup by removing
Jung Lu, the commander-in-chief of the armies in north China, a devoted
adherent of the empress dowager, in favour of a general whom he could
trust. The new commander was to lead his troops to the summer palace,
seize the empress dowager and, there is little doubt, put her to death. But
his plans were betrayed. The empress dowager was alerted, and on
23 September 1898 she returned secretly to Peking, accompanied by
troops, surprised the emperor and imprisoned him on an island in the
Lake Palace adjoining the Forbidden City. On 25 September it was
announced that the empress dowager had resumed the regency. The
reform movement was suppressed, the reformers hunted down and put to
death, with the exception of K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-chao, who
managed to escape abroad. T’an Ssu-t’ung refused to escape, believing
that the sacrifice of his life would demonstrate his loyalty to the emperor
and better serve the cause of reform.
During the remaining months of 1898 it was generally believed that the
days of the Kuang Hsu emperor were numbered, and that his ‘illness’
would soon be followed by the announcement of his decease. That this
act was deferred was due to the warnings received from the great southern
viceroys, especially Liu K’un-i of Nanking, who plainly told the empress
dowager that the death of the emperor would be considered in the south
as a murder and would probably provoke open revolution. The British
minister also told the court that the death of the emperor would be ill-
received by the foreign powers, who would not be inclined to credit the
story that it was due to natural causes. The empress dowager nevertheless
took the unprecedented step of naming an heir apparent, Prince P’u
Chun, the young son of Prince Tuan, who was a grandson of the Tao
Kuang emperor by his fifth son. P’u Chun thus descended from an elder
brother of I Huan, the Kuang Hsu emperor’s own father, and this fact
served to indicate that the Kuang Hsii emperor was now to be treated as
a usurper. Once again Prince P’u Lun, who might well be considered the
real heir, was passed over. The father of the new heir apparent, Prince
Tuan, was a notorious reactionary and violently anti-foreign. The minis-
ters of the foreign powers signified their disapproval of the appointment
of his son by refraining from offering any congratulations. His appoint-
ment was indeed a further violation of the dynastic succession law, which
had hitherto forbidden the nomination of an heir during the lifetime of
the reigning emperor, leaving the announcement of the name of the chosen
prince to be the last act of a dying monarch.
In the autumn of the year 1898 the Yellow River burst its banks causing
great devastation in the western part of Shantung and adjoining regions;
the harvest had been bad, the province was already disturbed by the high-
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handed actions of the German forces now established in Tsingtao, and
with the government once more in the hands of extreme reactionaries, the
Boxer sect, or to give it its true name the I Ho Tuan, or Society of the
Harmonious Fist, spread rapidly among the starving peasantry. In
October the sect made open attacks upon Chinese Christians in several
parts of the province, and these disorders were condoned, if not actually
encouraged, by the governor, Yu Hsien. In December 1898, following
protests from the foreign powers, Yu was removed, but not disgraced,
being appointed instead to the governorship of Shansi in March 1900.
Yuan Shih-k’ai replaced him in Shantung, and immediately set about a
vigorous campaign to suppress the Boxers. The attitude of the court to-
wards this movement was from the first ambivalent. In January 1900
Yuan was warned against too much severity, but continued his campaign
of suppression, driving the Boxers out of the province into the neigh-
bouring Chihli (Hopei), the metropolitan province in which Peking is
situated. The governor of Chihli, Yu Lu, vacillated, and the court on
11 January 1900, and again on 17 April, issued decrees condoning the
movement and deprecating any undue severity. The diplomatic corps
protested against the first of these decrees on 27 January and on 2 March,
but they were not revoked and the belief spread that the Boxers enjoyed
the favour of the court. Soon the Boxers themselves were openly making
this claim, and their following rapidly increased.
A strong party at court were now advocating that the Boxers be
recognised and enrolled as an official militia, the argument being that they
were giving proof of patriotic fervour which the dynasty should take care
to enlist in its own service rather than permit the independent growth of
such a movement among the people. The senior provincial officials were
not at all in agreement with this view. Yuan Shih-k’ai, now governor of
Shantung, firmly rejected such an idea, and Yu Lu of Chihli, who had at
first permitted the spread of the Boxers in his province, now opposed
them. In the month of May his own troops clashed with Boxer bands, and
repulsed them, disproving very clearly the legend of their invulnerability.
Yet aware of the trend at court Yu Lu did not follow up this action with a
decisive move against the Boxers. Late in the month of May, 1900, they
renewed their attacks and now began to destroy telegraph lines and
damage the railways in north China. The foreign ministers in Peking were
seriously alarmed both at the violence of the Boxers in the countryside,
from which missionaries and railway engineers were now hastily with-
drawing, and at the dubious attitude of the court, dominated as it was by
violent reactionaries. On 28 May the Boxers burned down the railway
station at Fengt’ai, a junction just south of Peking, and the legations
decided to call upon the foreign naval squadrons in China waters to send
up detachments to act as legation guards. These forces arrived in Peking
on 31 May.
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The destruction of the railways aroused the imperial military com-
manders and provincial officials; on 4 June Nieh Shih-ch’eng, a senior
military officer, engaged a large band of Boxers at Huangts’un, on the
railway between Peking and Tientsin, and severely defeated them. Yii Lu,
governor of the province, now urged the court to permit him to suppress
the Boxers by force (6 June). The destruction of the railway from Peking to
Paoting, the first section of the Peking-Hankow railway to be built, had
aroused the indignation of the viceroy of Hupei-Hunan, Chang Chih-tung,
who had sponsored the building of this line. He sent a memorandum to
the throne strongly urging the suppression of the Boxer bands.
Jung Lu, the favourite of the empress dowager, and commander-in-
chief of the Chinese forces in the north, occupied a key post. If he had
thrown his power against the Boxer movement it could still have been
crushed as easily as Yuan Shih-k’ai had destroyed it in Shantung. But
Jung Lu was very closely in touch with the court, he knew that the reac-
tionary party, led by Prince Tuan, father of the new heir apparent, were
ardently pro-Boxer; the empress dowager was wavering, but her dislike of
modern ways, which were necessarily foreign, and her hatred of reformers,
who were influenced by foreign ideas, impelled her to the support and
approval of the extreme anti-foreign party. Jung Lu did not favour the
Boxers, he certainly realised the risk of general war with the foreign powers
if they were left unchecked, but he was receiving contradictory and con-
flicting instructions from day to day, and he took refuge in total inaction.
On 7 June the Grand Councillor, Kang I, a violently anti-foreign
Manchu, was sent by the court to interview the Boxer leaders at Chochou,
some eighty miles south of Peking; whatever his real instructions may
have been, the choice of this man made it certain that the Boxers would
receive the approbation of the court, and in fact Kang ordered all imperial
troops to withdraw and allow the Boxers to move freely forward to the
capital. On 9 June the British minister, Sir Claude Macdonald, requested
Admiral Seymour, commanding the China station squadron, to land
forces to occupy the foreign concessions in Tientsin and reinforce the
legation guards in Peking.
The last train from Peking had left on 3 June; by the 5th the railway
between the capital and Tientsin had been wholly interrupted and des-
troyed. Curiously enough the Boxers left the telegraph line in operation
until 12 June. By that date Admiral Seymour with five hundred men had
landed at Tientsin, and with the addition of some detachments already in
that port, set out for Peking on 10 June with a total force of 1945 men.
On 13 June the court ordered the imperial generals to resist and repel this
expedition. Seymour’s force clashed with imperial troops at Langfang,
half-way to Peking, on the 13th, and finding himself opposed in great
strength, his advance blocked, the admiral was forced into a perilous
retreat to Tientsin, which he regained on 26 June. By that date China was
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at war with the foreign powers. On the afternoon of 13 June the Boxer
bands entered Peking in force and immediately started to massacre the
Chinese Christians, burn churches and molest foreign residents. A mem-
ber of the Japanese legation, Mr Sugiyama, had been murdered on the
1 ith just outside the city. The naval commanders at Tientsin decided that
the foreign concessions there and Seymour’s force could not be safe-
guarded unless the forts at Taku, which commanded the entrance to the
Hai Ho river on which Tientsin stands, were surrendered. They demanded
this of the garrison commander, who, having no orders from Peking,
refused. The forts were attacked on the night of 15 June, and captured by
naval landing parties.
Up to the capture of the Taku forts the court had still taken the attitude
that the foreign ministers should rely on the protection of the Chinese
government and that the Boxer movement was an internal affair with
which they had no right to concern themselves. It seems possible that the
empress dowager still hoped to overawe the foreign powers by following a
militant reactionary policy, which yet stopped short of war. On the other
hand the out-and-out pro-Boxers, such as Prince Tuan, were determined
to stop at nothing. On 16 June an imperial council was held, the emperor,
dragged from his confinement, being for once present. Prince Tuan and
his faction argued violently for war, the empress dowager inclined to then-
side, the emperor courageously opposed them and received the support of
the Grand Councillor Yuan Ch’ang, one of the last of the moderates still
in office. Nothing was decided.
On the next day the imperial council met again, and the empress
dowager produced an ultimatum which she said she had that day received
from the foreign ministers in Peking. This contained four demands:
(1) that a special place be assigned to the emperor for residence, (2) that
all revenues be collected by the foreign ministers, (3) that all military
affairs be committed to the direction of the foreign ministers, (4) that the
rule of the emperor be restored. These demands were a fabrication,
almost certainly the work of Prince Tuan, who since 10 June had been
appointed head of the Tsungli Yamen or ministry for foreign affairs. The
empress appears to have believed them to be genuine. Although Li Shan
and other senior members of the Tsungli Yamen were sent next day to
interview Sir Claude Macdonald they were not instructed to inquire
whether these demands were false or true, although they all believed from
the tenor of the meeting that no such demands had been made. Mac-
donald, on the other hand, rejected a request that he stop the foreign
forces from landing and marching on Peking.
On 19 June the court learned of the fall of the Taku forts: regarding this
as an act of war the empress dowager instructed the Tsungli Yamen to
break off relations with the foreign powers and order their representatives
to leave Peking under guard of Chinese troops. This the ministers refused,
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believing, with every justification, that such protection would be valueless
and that to leave would be to invite a general massacre. On 21 June
China declared war on the western powers. On the previous day, 20 June,
Baron von Kettler, the German minister, set out to pay a call on the
Tsungli Yamen to protest against the attacks being made by Boxers upon
the legation guards. As he proceeded up the Hatamen street in his official
chair he was stopped and murdered by a Manchu soldier acting under the
direct orders of Prince Chuang, one of the pro-Boxer imperial princes.
On the same evening a general assault upon the foreign legations was
begun by the Boxers in Peking. The foreign residents fortified themselves
in their legations, taking the large walled enclosure of the British legation,
a former Manchu prince’s palace, as the centre point of their resistance.
Meanwhile the Boxers were attacking the concessions at Tientsin and an
international force drawn from the naval squadrons and leased ports in
the Far East was assembling to defend Tientsin and relieve the legations in
Peking. Two thousand men were landed at Tientsin on 24 June, and
thenceforth the concessions were not really in acute danger. In Peking the
foreign residents successfully repelled numerous and continual Boxer
assaults. On the other hand the imperial troops, particularly Muslim
forces from Kansu commanded by a violent xenophobe general, T’ung
Fu-hsiang, himself a Muslim, who had joined in the assault, were un-
provided with artillery; although Jung Lu had modern guns at his
disposal these were never used against the legations. The circumstances
surrounding this strange restraint have never been fully elucidated; Jung
Lu could certainly have wiped out the legations had he allowed his
artillery to be employed; the court openly supported the Boxers, but the
commander-in-chief held back, while at the same time deploring, in tele-
grams to the southern viceroys, his inability to influence the policy of the
empress dowager (26 June).
A vital decision had been taken by the great viceroys of south China:
on 21 June, when the edict declaring war on the powers was received,
Chang Chih-tung of Hunan-Hupei, Liu K’un-i of the lower Yangtse pro-
vinces, Li Hung-chang who was now viceroy of Kuangtung-Kuangsi
(resident at Canton), and Yuan Shih-k’ai, governor of Shantung, con-
sulted each other by telegram and agreed to suppress the war edict and
maintain neutrality. A very important part in this decision was taken by
the Director of Posts and Telegraphs, Sheng Hsuan-huai, an official
resident at Shanghai, who had a liberal outlook, and although not holding
very high rank, was strategically placed by his post to learn the news and
relay it to others. From 24 to 26 June Sheng negotiated with the foreign
consuls in Shanghai for the protection of the concessions in that city and
the peace of the Yangtse valley. An agreement was arrived at, though
never formally signed, by which the southern viceroys and provincial
governors undertook to protect foreign residents, suppress Boxer infiltra-
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tion and maintain normal trade if the foreign powers refrained from
landing troops or sending warships up the Yangtse. This virtual secession
of the south saved most of China from the consequences of the Boxer
rebellion.
The southern viceroys were, indeed, prepared to go farther than this ;
they urged Yuan Shih-k’ai, who was much closer to Peking, to march on
the capital with his army, suppress the Boxers and end the trouble. Had
Yuan done so there is little doubt that he could have succeeded, but his
own position would have been exceedingly difficult. On 28 June he
refused this suggestion, and remained inactive, keeping the Boxers out of
Shantung, but also taking no action against the foreign troops then
invading the neighbouring province of Chihli. The incoherence and
disintegration of the empire could not have been more strikingly illumi-
nated.
On 14 July the allied forces captured the Chinese city of Tientsin and
ended the attacks upon the foreign concessions there. This success gave
the reactionary party in Peking pause; it was clear that the Boxers were
proving a disappointment; no progress had been made in the attack upon
the legations, and China was now at war with a number of the most
powerful nations in the world, who were preparing invasion. Such a
prospect might well have daunted reactionaries even more bigoted than
Prince Tuan and the empress dowager, but they did little to avert the
catastrophe. Attacks on the legations were indeed suspended between
14 and 26 July. A further attempt was made to get the besieged diplo-
mats to leave the city escorted by Chinese troops, a proposition which was
not accepted. Another curious incident at this time illustrates the devious
policy of the court, or the independent action of some of its servants. To
the relief of the outside world a message was received in Washington from
the American minister in Peking, Mr Conger, in which he gave news of
the situation of the legations and confirmed, for the first time since the
siege had begun, that their defence still held. This message was sent to the
Chinese minister in Washington through the Tsungli Yamen, the head
of which was the notorious Prince Tuan himself.
Six days later, on 26 July, the empress once more changed her policy,
resumed the attacks upon the legations, and two days later had the two
remaining moderate and anti-Boxer members of the Grand Council,
Yuan Ch’ang and Hsii Ching-ch’eng, executed. On 4 August the allied
forces left Tientsin to advance on Peking. In the capital the situation was
now one of the utmost confusion. Kansu soldiery and Boxers roamed the
streets slaying anyone suspected of foreign sympathies, habits, knowledge
or demeanour. The homes of powerful officials were invaded and looted,
thousands of the wealthier citizens fled from the doomed city. Yet the
court appeared unable either to control the troops or to comprehend the
nature of the disaster which had overtaken the dynasty and nation. The
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advance of the allied army, numbering less than 20,000 men, was rapid
and irresistible. Yu Lu, the governor of Chihli, was defeated and his
forces dispersed on 6 August; he took his own life the same evening.
Another force under the general Li Ping-heng was routed on the 9th, and
when the city of T’ungchou, starting-point of the Grand Canal, fell on
the 1 ith, Li committed suicide. The allies were now within twelve miles of
Peking.
The debacle could no longer be concealed or evaded ; on the same day
that T’ungchou fell the court telegraphed to Li Hung-chang, at his distant
post in Canton, urging him to come north at once to undertake peace
negotiations with the foreign powers. But Li was in no hurry to begin this
thankless task: he waited first to see whether there were signs of a real
change of heart, realising that so long as Prince Tuan and other pro-
Boxer leaders remained around the empress dowager, any negotiations
would be a waste of time.
On the afternoon of 14 August 1900 the allied forces reached the walls
of Peking, entered the city almost without any resistance and relieved the
besieged legations; very early the next morning, 15 August, amid scenes of
the utmost panic and confusion, the empress dowager, disguised as a
Chinese peasant woman, accompanied by the emperor, P’u Chun the heir
apparent, and a handful of attendants, fled in common carts from the
palace and the city. Before leaving the empress dowager ordered the
emperor’s favourite concubine, Chen Fei, the only woman for whom he
had affection, and his only friend, to be thrust down a well in the court-
yard just inside the north gate of the Forbidden City. The flight of the
court took them first to Huai Lai, beyond the Great Wall, which they
reached on the 17th, and where they for the first time received some
assistance and relief. Continuing westward, since the pursuit of the allies
seemed to threaten, they reached T’aiyiian, capital of Shansi, on 10 Sep-
tember, and finally came to rest at Sian, capital of Shensi province, on
26 October. Peking meanwhile was in the hands of the allies, and Li
Hung-chang had made his slow way to Tientsin to open negotiations,
arriving there on 19 September.
During the course of the next year these negotiations and the aftermath
of the Boxer movement determined the status of China for the remaining
decade of the Ch’ing dynasty’s history. Russia had occupied Manchuria
during the autumn months of 1900. In the south the wise policy of the
great viceroys at one and the same time restrained the foreigners from
fresh incursions and demands, and staved off the revolution which already
threatened the discredited dynasty. In distant Sian the court, at first still
dominated by the Boxer princes and ministers, was slowly brought to
realise that only the repudiation of their policies and their punishment and
elimination could appease the foreign powers and prevent the partition of
the helpless empire. Early in January 1901 P’u Chun, the son of Prince
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Tuan, was deprived of his status as heir apparent, and expelled from the
palace. With great difficulty Li Hung-chang managed to save the life of
Prince Tuan himself, who was instead exiled for life to the remote parts of
Chinese Turkestan. The other pro-Boxer princes, ministers and governors,
such as Yii Hsien, were either ordered to commit suicide or decapitated.
On 7 September 1901 Li Hung-chang signed the peace protocol. Two
months later the old statesman, the last of the great generation who had
fought the T’ai P’ing rebellion and striven, with all their limitations, to
save the dynasty, died on 7 November 1901. Half a century was to pass
before China recovered from the degradation, weakness and incoherent
confusion to which the reactionary policies of the empress dowager and
her like-minded supporters had finally brought the empire. That recovery,
when it came, was the work of revolutionaries beside whom such re-
formers as K’ang Yu-wei, the bugbear of the empress, was an arch-
conservative. The programme of reforms which the Kuang Hsu emperor
had so ardently embraced, and which had roused so forceful a reaction,
was to seem the mildest of moderate conservative progress. The revolution
which the policy of the reactionary party had made inevitable swept away
not only the throne and dynasty, but the whole social and economic
system of old China.
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CHAPTER XVII
JAPAN
I t is convenient to regard 1868 as marking a turning-point in the
modem history of Japan. In January of that year a group of new
leaders seized power in the then imperial capital of Kyoto, men who
became, despite subsequent shifts in both policy and personnel, respon-
sible for initiating changes which revolutionised the country’s political,
economic and social institutions and eventually raised it to a high level of
international power and prestige.
Since the beginning of the seventeenth century government had been in
the hands of a line of feudal rulers, the Tokugawa family. As shogun,
nominally the emperor’s military deputies, they had possessed the heredi-
tary de facto authority of monarchs, exercising direct control over their
own enormous domains and effectively subordinating the lords of the great
feudal territories into which the rest of the country was divided. They
sought, with remarkable success, to preserve their power by preventing
change. After about 1640 Japan was by their decree almost entirely cut
off from contact with the rest of the world, while at home political
relationships were frozen in their seventeenth-century form, rigid social
distinctions developed and were enforced for all classes of the population,
and attempts were made to inhibit even economic change.
It was in its economic aspects that this policy was least successful. By
the eighteenth century domestic commerce had expanded and the feudal
class, the samurai, for the most part resident in castle-towns, had become
accustomed to a higher standard of living. They had not, however,
secured a commensurate increase in revenue or income. As a result, both
domain governments and individual samurai became steadily more in-
debted to city rice-brokers and financiers. Attempts to secure for the lord
a higher proportion of the product of the soil brought peasant revolts.
Devices by which domain governments engaged in monopoly trading, in
co-operation with the merchants of the towns, alienated the richer
farmers and an emerging class of rural entrepreneurs. Nor did these
measures benefit the majority of samurai. Most of them derived their
income not directly from the land but from rice stipends paid by the fief
treasury; and these stipends, far from being increased, were often reduced
when the treasury found itself in financial difficulties.
By 1850, therefore, there was widespread recognition in Japan that
Tokugawa society was facing a serious crisis. Opposition to the regime
existed almost everywhere. A number of the most powerful of the feudal
lords continued to resent their subordination to the Tokugawa — indeed, a
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great part of the machinery of central government was directed to keeping
their ambitions in check. Poverty was weakening the loyalty of the lower-
ranking samurai, while the more able and energetic of them resented the
hereditary system of office-holding which stifled their political ambitions.
The wealthy merchants of the towns, though too deeply involved in feudal
finance to oppose the regime wholeheartedly, were restive at the inferior
social status it imposed upon them. The peasants expressed their hatreds
increasingly in violence.
All these elements played a part in bringing about the downfall of the
Tokugawa. Motives varied widely, and at no time was the whole welded
into a single movement with agreed objectives. On the other hand, there
were two factors which tended to provide a basis of co-operation beyond
the mere desire for change. During the first half of the nineteenth century
there was a growing awareness that Japan’s isolation was threatened by
western expansion in China and on the mainland to the north. This esti-
mate was apparently confirmed by the appearance of an American
squadron demanding treaty relations in 1853. Since Japan’s military
strength was clearly unequal to the task of enforcing the policy of seclu-
sion, treaties had to be signed; and there were many who argued that this
external threat made still more urgent the need for radical reform.
Since the Tokugawa government was responsible for the conduct of
foreign relations, it had to assume also the responsibility for unpopular
concessions to the west. This fact strengthened the appeal of its only
potential rival as a centre of legitimate authority, the imperial court,
which remained uncompromisingly hostile to western demands. For a
century or more there had been men who urged the desirability of reviving
the court’s prestige and the emperor now began to fill a double role in the
anti-Tokugawa movement: to provide a focus of loyalty which trans-
cended sectional interests, at least superficially, and to give an air of
respectability to revolutionary activities carried on in his name.
Thus, by 1868, the so-called ‘honour-the-emperor’ ( sonno ) movement
had made possible an alliance of anti-Tokugawa forces. Power was
seized, when the opportunity came, by a loose coalition of forces under
the leadership of a group of samurai of middle rank from four great
domains of west Japan: from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and Hizen. They
had already won control of their own domain governments, thereby
securing a nucleus of armed force and the co-operation, not always
willing, of their feudal lords. They had allies in the lower ranks of the
court nobility, vital as a means of access to the emperor. Finally, they
could count on the financial support of some of the merchants and the
active help of many local leaders in the countryside. These were the ele-
ments which were in time to form the ruling class of modem Japan.
In January 1868 troops under the command of anti-Tokugawa leaders
seized the imperial palace in Kyoto. Decrees were issued in the name of
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the boy-emperor Meiji — to use his reign title: his given name was
Mutsuhito— depriving the shogun of his power and his lands and re-
asserting the emperor’s direct responsibility for the conduct of affairs.
The former offices of state were swept away and the administration
entrusted to new advisers. Almost at once Tokugawa adherents took up
arms to defend their privileges, but they were defeated at clashes outside
Kyoto in February and thereafter offered surprisingly little resistance. In
April the shogun’s surrender was negotiated and his capital of Edo was
formally occupied. A few months later the imperial court was transferred
there and, renamed Tokyo, the city resumed its function as the centre of
national government. Meanwhile, scattered fighting continued in the
north and north-east. It was not until the early summer of 1869 that the
last pockets of Tokugawa resistance were finally overcome.
For this first year and a half of its existence the Meiji government faced
immediate problems which left it little time to grapple with questions of
reform. It began without finances or administrative machinery, for both
had in the past been provided by the Tokugawa from their own resources
of men and lands. As the fighting progressed more and more of the
Tokugawa territories came under imperial control. So, too, did former
Tokugawa officials, many of whom eventually took service under the
emperor. Yet in the interval money had to be found and an organisation
created with which to fight the civil war. Loans were raised from sympa-
thetic merchants, Tokugawa cash reserves were seized wherever they could
be found, and the balance of expenditure was made up by printing notes.
An army, the other primary need, was created by summoning contingents
from those domains which had rallied to the imperial cause, each unit
serving under its own feudal leaders. This army, however, was fully
engaged in fighting the Tokugawa. It was not available as a means of
bringing pressure to bear on the great majority of feudal lords, enjoying
almost complete autonomy within their own boundaries, who were con-
tent to await the outcome of the struggle before declaring their allegiance.
Hence, for some months at the beginning of 1868, the new government’s
authority was enforcible only in the vicinity of the capital and in those
areas where loyal troops were operating. At this time Japan had no
effective central government at all.
It is not surprising that in these circumstances the task of building an
institutional framework for the new regime proceeded slowly. The first
step, in January 1868, had been to create posts around the emperor’s
person for members of the anti-Tokugawa coalition. An imperial prince
was made nominal head of the administration. Under him were two
groups of councillors, the senior comprising several members of the court
and a number of feudal lords, the junior (and more numerous) being
lesser court nobles and samurai leaders from the allied domains. In
February administrative departments were formed, councillors being ap-
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pointed to the senior offices within them. Their functions, like their staff,
were limited. Such rights as they had to intervene in local matters were
dependent on the concurrence of feudal lords, even — perhaps especially —
in the territories from which the councillors themselves were drawn. It
remained so as long as there was any doubt about the outcome of the civil
war. In an attempt to meet this difficulty and to widen the basis of support,
samurai representatives from all the domains were summoned in March
to act as a kind of consultative assembly, while on 6 April the court issued
an imperial pronouncement, known as the Charter Oath, setting out in
vague but reassuring terms the policies it planned to follow. The cardinal
points were a promise to carry out wide consultation on all important
decisions, to abolish ‘base customs’ of the past, and to seek new know-
ledge ‘ throughout the world ’ as the basis of reform.
With the shogun’s surrender in April and the occupation of Edo
shortly after, the imperial government felt more secure. On 1 1 June 1868
it promulgated revised arrangements for the central administration,
ostensibly in fulfilment of the Charter Oath. These reflected western
influence in their enunciation of the principle of separation of powers, but
in practice the executive remained supreme and the real function of the
legislative, like the samurai assembly which had preceded it, was to act as
a sounding-board of feudal opinion. This was still more obvious in the
next reorganisation, effected in August 1869, a few weeks after the fighting
in the north had ended. The assembly now lost the power of initiating
legislation and after a few meetings was adjourned sine die in October
1870. It was abolished altogether in June 1873 without having met again.
The executive was put under the general supervision of a central board,
the Dajokan, subordinate to which were six ministerial departments:
Civil Affairs, Finance, War, Justice, Imperial Household, and Foreign
Affairs. At the same time, the number of senior posts was reduced and
office-holders, regardless of social origin, were given court rank commen-
surate with their responsibilities.
Yet it was the nature of the appointments made, rather than organisa-
tional changes, which reflect the most important development of this
period. Initially, while the struggle with the Tokugawa was continuing,
it had been necessary both to maintain the alliance and to reconcile as
much ‘neutral’ opinion as possible. Appointments were therefore made
not only from the ranks of those court nobles, feudal lords and samurai
who had been most active in the anti-Tokugawa movement, but also from
other groups (within the same social range) which showed themselves
willing to co-operate. As the new government grew stronger, however, the
basis of selection narrowed. After June 1868 fewer councillors were ap-
pointed from the imperial court, while those of feudal origin came mostly
from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and Hizen. In August 1869 the remaining
figureheads of the Restoration movement, high-ranking court nobles and
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feudal lords of the original coalition, were removed from the highest
offices of state to make way for the small group of men of lower rank who
had long determined policy behind the scenes. These included the court
noble Iwakura Tomomi and a number of samurai: Okubo Toshimichi
and Saigo Takamori of Satsuma; Kido Koin, Ito Hirobumi and Yama-
gata Aritomo of Choshu; Okuma Shigenobu of Hizen; Goto Shojiro and
Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa. 1 These, with their immediate subordinates, men
of similar origin to themselves, formed the core of the new leadership.
It would be wrong to suggest that Japan’s new rulers possessed from
the beginning a detailed plan of the uses to which they would put their
power. Their ultimate objective was clear enough : Japan had to be saved
from internal disruption and foreign threat. The precise measures to be
adopted to this end and the priorities to be assigned them were more diffi-
cult to determine, but at least it was clear that, whatever else needed to be
done, the government’s authority had to be given reality and its decisions
made valid for the country as a whole. Feudal separatism was the greatest
obstacle to the achievement of this goal. As one of the Meiji leaders wrote
some thirty years later: ‘The annihilation of centrifugal forces taking the
form of autocratic feudal provinces was a necessary step to the unification
of the country under a strong central government, without which we
would not have been able to offer a united front to the outside forces ’
There is no evidence that the abolition of feudalism had been decided
on before the new leaders rose to power, though they attempted from the
first to establish a position of supremacy for the imperial government as
against any other focus of traditional loyalty. The Shinto religion, with
its emphasis on imperial divinity, was given an important place in the new
official hierarchy. More directly, attempts were made to gain some
measure of control over the affairs of the feudal domains. As early as
March 1868, samurai entering the service of the central government were
ordered to sever relations with their fiefs, while in the following year the
most influential of them were granted imperial stipends and court rank.
In June 1868 certain restrictions were imposed on the freedom of action
of the feudal lords in their relations with each other. By the end of the
year they had been ordered to appoint special officials for liaison with the
government and to standardise administration within their territories on a
pattern laid down by Tokyo. A similar centralising tendency was apparent
in the handling of lands confiscated from the Tokugawa. After a brief
period of military government during the campaign, they were designated
as imperial cities (fu) or prefectures (ken) and brought directly under the
central administration.
For some this was still not enough. Even before June 1 868 Kido had
proposed that the lords be required to surrender all their lands, since this
1 In citing Japanese personal names the Japanese order has been followed, that is, family
name followed by given name.
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was the only means of ensuring effective centralisation. When the proposal
was rejected by his colleagues, he turned his efforts to persuading his own
lord, Mori of Choshu, and eventually won him over, subject only to the
understanding that Satsuma make a similar gesture. Okubo Toshimichi
was approached in November and agreed to use his influence with the
other Satsuma leaders. By February 1869 they had all given their support,
as had also Itagaki of Tosa and Okuma of Hizen. On 2 March the lords
of the four fiefs submitted a memorial putting their lands and people at
the emperor’s disposal. In the discussions which followed in the imperial
council there were those who urged that this was an opportunity to
abolish the domains and extend the prefectural system, but both Kido and
Okubo insisted that the government was still too weak for such a step to
be successful. A decision was not reached till July, when the memorial was
accepted, the other lords were ordered to take similar action, and the
former feudal rulers were appointed as imperial governors of the terri-
tories they had surrendered.
This compromise, however disappointing to the more radical thinkers,
seems to have been much what the lords and many of their retainers had
expected. Some of them, especially in Choshu and Satsuma, resented even
this limited degree of central control. On the other hand, the reform was
not entirely successful in the government’s eyes, since local officials were
still local nominees and frequently gave only token allegiance to Tokyo.
It became more and more obvious, at least to men like Okubo and Kido,
that the process, once begun, must be carried to its logical conclusion.
Throughout 1870 they tried in vain to overcome the objections of col-
leagues in their own domains. Early in 1871, when it began to seem that
the whole basis of the regime might be destroyed by continued disagree-
ment on this issue, they invoked imperial intervention and made renewed
efforts to effect a reconciliation. This time they were successful. In April
arrangements were made to move Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa forces into
Tokyo in case of trouble. On 29 August fifty-seven provincial governors,
former feudal lords, were summoned to the emperor’s presence and
informed that the domains were to be abolished, all territory thereafter to
be divided into prefectures under direct imperial control.
The removal of political barriers within the country made it possible to
solve the urgent problem of providing the government with an adequate
and stable revenue. By the abolition of the fiefs, it had fallen heir to their
debts and other commitments, greatest of which was the annual cost of
samurai stipends. It had also inherited their feudal dues. The dis-
advantage was that these not only varied widely from one locality to
another, but also were paid in kind as a percentage of the crop. They
therefore fluctuated with seasonal yield, as well as being difficult to
collect. A solution could be found by substituting for them a land tax
payable in cash, but before this could be done it was necessary to establish
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ownership of each piece of land (and hence responsibility for the payment
of tax). In February 1872 the Tokugawa ban on alienation of land was
abolished. At about the same time the government began to issue certifi-
cates of title, beginning with certain types of land in Tokyo during
January and extending the process throughout the country from July.
The introduction of land tax itself came in 1873. It was to be a cash
payment of 3 per cent of the assessed value of the land, in addition to
which local authorities were permitted to levy a maximum of a further
1 per cent. Valuations were so calculated that the total yield was approxi-
mately equal to that of the former feudal dues, though the fact that it had
to be paid in cash at a fixed date and was unvarying from year to year,
whether harvests were good or bad, made it irksome to the majority of
farmers. Its importance to the government can be seen from the calcula-
tion that it provided on average approximately 78 per cent of ordinary
revenue up to 1881, despite its reduction to a per cent assessment in
1876.
By 1873, therefore, after almost five years in power, the Meiji govern-
ment had laid the foundations of its own authority. It had created a
workable system of central administration, brought local affairs directly
under its own control and provided itself with a predictable annual
revenue. It had also taken the first steps towards creating a military force
which would be free of feudal loyalties. Conscription laws had been
announced in 1872 and the training of a conscript army began the fol-
lowing year, eventually providing an effective weapon against feudal
revolt and giving invaluable support to the new police force in the
suppression of peasant riots. Meanwhile the government had already
begun to devote its attention to questions of national strength and
international politics.
Almost the first act of the regime in 1 868 had been to issue an explicit
disavowal of its own former anti-foreign slogans and take steps to sup-
press those activities of its own adherents which might bring Japan into
conflict with the western powers. None the less, there remained a strong
element of hostility to the west in Japanese thinking. A major object of
this hostility was the treaty system, negotiated in 1858 and expanded in
1866, by which Japan had been deprived of legal control over foreign
nationals in her ports and of the right to modify her tariffs on foreign
trade. In 1871, after the abolition of the fiefs, Iwakura Tomomi took a
mission abroad to explore the possibilities of treaty revision. In Washing-
ton it was made clear to the group — which included Okubo, Kido and
Ito, as well as Iwakura— that there was little hope of early change; and
thereafter the mission became more concerned with the acquisition of
knowledge than with diplomatic negotiations. In London, Ito inspected
factories. In Berlin, Iwakura was lectured on real-politik by Bismarck.
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After some eighteen months of travel, this section of Japan’s leadership
became convinced that only through a programme of domestic reform,
far more extensive than they had previously envisaged, could their country
achieve the respect of the powers.
Meanwhile, those who had been left behind in Tokyo were taking a
different course. The occasion was a series of disputes with Korea, pro-
voked by that country’s insistence on maintaining the same policy of
national seclusion that Japan had now abandoned, and Japan’s caretaker
government, of which the most powerful member was Saigo Takamori,
decided to back its demands with force in the summer of 1873. News of
this decision brought the Iwakura mission hurrying home from Europe.
It reversed the decision after an acrimonious dispute with Saigo, who,
with a number of others, resigned from the government. 1 The outcome
of this crisis determined the pattern of Japanese politics, both at home and
abroad, for the following twenty years. The men now driven into opposi-
tion made constant attacks on their former colleagues and succeeded, as
we shall see, in modifying the course of Japan’s constitutional develop-
ment, but they never won back control. Okubo remained the dominant
figure till his assassination in 1878, supported by Iwakura and, less con-
sistently, by Kido. Kido died in 1877 and Iwakura in 1883, but they were
succeeded by others of like mind, notably Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata
Aritomo. There was no essential change of policy. Japan, until 1893, con-
tinued to act with restraint abroad. At home, her government launched a
programme of sweeping reform.
A description of reforms in the machinery of government, both central
and local, can most conveniently be undertaken in the context of political
rivalries and the constitutional struggle, discussion of which follows
separately. It is sufficient to emphasise here the general nature of the
process taking place in the years after the Korean crisis. There was a
gradual tightening of control over administration, accompanied by the
growth of a professional bureaucracy, members of which owed their ap-
pointment and promotion, in part at least, to a system of state examina-
tions. Simultaneously there was a progressive introduction of western
methods and ideas, directed partly towards increasing efficiency, partly
towards giving Japan that appearance of ‘respectability’, as the west
understood the word, which was a necessary prelude to treaty revision.
In 1875, for example, a committee was formed to draft a new civil code,
though it was over twenty years before revision and amendment of its work
was finished. The result, finally adopted and enforced in 1898, showed the
influence of a variety of western models, French, German and British. At
a less formal level, Japanese social habits also engaged the government’s
attention, especially those which might arouse criticism abroad. Official
regulations and exhortations covered subjects as varied as the behaviour
1 Below, pp. 645-6, for further details.
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of Japanese tourists overseas, the sale of girls as prostitutes, pornographic
literature, even stage jokes.
The creation of a system of compulsory education was one of the most
important achievements of these years. Institutions of higher education
established in the Tokugawa period, concerned chiefly with the training
of officials, continued for a time under the supervision of the new govern-
ment. In 1877 a number of these were combined to form Tokyo Imperial
University. Several other state universities were added soon after, while
some of the private foundations dealing with western studies also acquired
university status. Before this, in 1872, the Education Department had
announced a plan for primary education, beginning at the age of six,
which envisaged the establishment of one elementary school for approxi-
mately every 600 of population. Despite a shortage of funds and teachers,
expansion was fast enough to enable the compulsory period of attendance
to be increased from its original 16 months to three years in 1880 and four
years in 1886. By this date 46 per cent of the children of school age were
receiving primary education. The figure rose to 61 per cent in 1896 and
95 per cent a decade later. Normal schools, for the training of teachers,
had begun in 1872 and high-schools were added in 1894.
The pattern of educational administration was based at first on that of
France, but there was a period between 1880 and 1885 when Am erican
methods were adopted, including the use of elected school-boards. After
1885, however, with the appointment of Mori Arinori as Education
Minister, there was an increase in nationalist influences and a turning
towards the German models of government supervision. Much of the
curriculum was still devoted to a training in ‘practical’, that is, western
subjects, but there was a new emphasis on the study of Japanese history
and literature, accompanied by a deliberate attempt to inculcate habits of
loyalty and civic obedience. This trend was reinforced by the issue in 1890
of the Rescript on Education. The wording of the document revealed
clearly that a principal object of education was thereafter to be the pro-
duction of useful and disciplined citizens of an authoritarian state.
Government control was also a feature of the plans to give Japan a
modern network of communications. The government postal service,
established in 1871, was extended to all major centres of population in
1873, from which date private competition was forbidden. Telegraphs
had been made a state monopoly the previous year, the construction of
major trunk lines being more or less completed in the following decade,
and a similar decision was taken concerning telephones in 1890, soon after
their introduction to Japan. Railway development, though not always
under state ownership, depended heavily on the government for finance
and technical assistance, a fact which enabled officials to determine
priorities in building. The first line was that between Tokyo and Yoko-
hama, begun in 1870 and opened in 1872, but this was envisaged as the
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first stage of a route linking Tokyo with Osaka, the whole of which was
not completed till 1888. Thereafter railways were extended rapidly, on
both government and private initiative.
The steps taken to ensure facilities for education and communications
played an important part in stimulating economic development, as did
the provision of a framework of legal security and political order. Yet
government intervention in economic matters went far beyond the crea-
tion of an environment favourable to growth. This is true particularly in
the field of industrialisation. The Meiji leaders took over from their
Tokugawa predecessors, as well as from some of the great domains, a
number of recently established enterprises of western type. They included
shipyards, like that at Yokosuka, and several plants for the manufacture
of weapons. Strategic industries of this kind, directly related to military
strength, were inevitably of concern to men who saw their country
threatened from abroad; and this segment of the economy, like commu-
nications, remained subject to direct government control. Similar
reasoning prompted government interest in other types of industrial
undertaking. Wealth, it was realised, was the basis of military power — the
slogan of these years was fukoku-kyohei, ‘rich country, strong army’.
Other motives worked in the same direction. The opening of the ports had
brought into Japan a flood of cheap foreign manufactured goods, the
demand for which was greater than anything the country could provide
by way of exports. The adverse trade balance which resulted in the period
1 868—8 1 caused a constant and disturbing drain of specie. Moreover, the
import of foreign goods was ruining a number of domestic handicraft
industries on which the heavily taxed farmer depended for cash income.
Thus a programme of industrialisation had a number of attractions apart
from its relevance to the question of defence. It could cut down the
volume of imports by providing substitutes manufactured in Japan, while
the new factories, if placed in areas hard hit by foreign competition,
could provide alternative employment for surplus rural labour.
This does not explain why the Meiji government chose to initiate, rather
than simply to encourage, new types of economic enterprise. The answer
lies partly in the need for speed, if Japan were not soon to succumb to
foreign pressure, partly in the lack of capital available for investment.
The growth of commerce in the Tokugawa period had not been great
enough to promote widespread capital accumulation on any scale, while,
with few exceptions, such rich financial houses as had emerged were ruined
by the collapse of the feudal system on which their operations had
depended. In addition, rents and interest rates remained high after 1868,
making land and usury a more attractive investment than factories.
Hence, to achieve rapid action, the government itself was forced to give a
lead. It did so in a wide variety of ways. Foreign technicians were
brought in as teachers and advisers — the Ministry of Public Works alone
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employed as many as 130 by 1879 — and Japanese students were sent
abroad for training. Technical schools were established and trade exhibi-
tions organised. Foreign goods and equipment were imported for loan to
local authorities as models, while the government even bought spinning
machinery abroad for resale to Japanese entrepreneurs on the instalment
plan. It engaged directly in foreign trade, selling shipments of rice, silk
and tea to finance its imports. Finally, it established factories of its own,
some of them, such as a cotton-spinning mill in Aichi (1878), to serve
primarily as training centres, others, like the Fukugawa cement factory
(1875), to provide goods which would otherwise have had to be imported at
considerable cost. It has been estimated that total government investment
in industry averaged at least 5^ per cent of ordinary revenue in the years
1868-80. At the end of that period there were three shipbuilding yards,
five munitions works, ten mines and fifty-two factories listed as state-owned.
The financing of this programme presented many difficulties to a
government without reserves. Foreign loans were not a possible expedi-
ent, both because of the reluctance of investors abroad to risk capital in
Japan and because the Japanese themselves feared they might open the
way to foreign control of the economy. Since taxation of the farmer was
already at a maximum and the treaties forbade any change in tariffs, a
temporary solution was found in the large-scale printing of paper money.
For a time the growth in economic activity proved capable of absorbing
the larger issue of notes in circulation. After 1877, however, inflation
rapidly became serious. Higher prices, especially of rice, brought a spurt
of rural prosperity. On the other hand, they sharply reduced the real
value of the land tax on which the government depended for the greater
part of its revenue. In October 1881, with the appointment of Matsukata
Masayoshi as Finance Minister, firm measures were introduced to restore
stability to the public finances, including new taxes on rice-wine and
tobacco, stringent economy in administration, and the reduction of
government grants and subsidies. It was in this context that the decision
was taken to dispose of most of the industrial enterprises founded and still
run by the state. To sell them would recoup part, at least, of the govern-
ment’s investment in them and relieve it of the continued drain of operating
losses. Only the military industries were retained, the others being dis-
posed of as opportunity arose, mostly in 1 884 ; and they went, as a rule, at
bargain prices, to men with government connections, thereby playing a
part in creating the close relationship between government and the great
financial-industrial combines ( zaibatsu ) which was a conspicuous feature
of later economic development.
The Matsukata policy was successful in balancing the budget and
restoring the value of the currency. Inevitably it did so at some cost in
human terms, especially in the countryside, and it must bear responsi-
bility for much of the rural unrest that characterised the next few years.
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This fact underlines the value which the Meiji leaders placed on their
modernisation programme. Both before and after 1881 they showed
themselves willing to maintain it, if necessary, at a sacrifice of rural
interests which constituted a considerable political risk. Yet for agri-
culture, if not agriculturalists, they had a real concern. Much of the
government’s economic training programme was devoted to improving
methods of agricultural production, with the result that the yield of rice
and other cereal crops grew steadily, almost keeping pace with the growth
of population and the gradual increase in consumption per head. By 1 893,
in fact, despite the effort the government had made to promote industriali-
sation, Japan was still predominantly rural. Modem factories were few
and small. Foreign trade was modest, important chiefly as a means of
technical borrowing. Most of the population still lived in small com-
munities, following agriculture as their primary occupation, and land-tax
remained the major source of government revenue. It was not until after
the Sino-Japanese War that the economy moved at all rapidly towards
new forms.
The same cannot be said of political structure during these same years.
Quite apart from administrative changes undertaken for purposes of
increased efficiency, there were others — and these the most striking —
which arose out of a bitter struggle for power between the government
and its critics.
The form of opposition which gave the government most difficulty
during the 1870’s was that arising from samurai discontent. The policy of
conciliating samurai opinion was gradually abandoned as the central
authority grew stronger, and was replaced by a series of attacks on feudal
privilege. Among the earliest were decrees which established legal equality
between the different classes and forbade the samurai to wear distinctive
dress or carry swords. The conscription laws, moreover, though not im-
mediately effective, soon threatened to rob them of their status as a
military elite. However, it was not until their economic position was
endangered that resentment was expressed in large-scale violence. With the
abolition of the domains in 1871 the government assumed responsibility
for the payment of samurai stipends, but on a reduced scale and with
differences between various levels within the class. The lords themselves
were treated generously. This, indeed, was an inducement designed to
secure their acquiescence in the change. For many of lower rank, how-
ever, already suffering hardship under the old system, the reductions now
effected brought their incomes below subsistence level. Even so, their
loyalty was not entirely destroyed, for in the first half of 1873 they were
co-operating extensively with the police in suppressing local peasant
revolts, possibly because they still had faith in some, at least, of the new
leaders. By the end of the same year this no longer obtained. The victory
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of Okubo and his colleagues in the dispute over Korea frustrated samurai
hopes of overseas conquest and caused the resignation, among others, of
Saigo Takamori and Eto Shimpei. Almost simultaneously came a threat
to what was left of feudal stipends. Faced with growing expenditures, the
government sought to economise by offering samurai the option of taking
a capital grant instead of an annual pension. A little less then three years
later, in 1876, this was made compulsory. All former samurai were forced
to accept a lump sum in interest-bearing government bonds, yielding far
less than their original stipends. Some idea of the effect can be gained
from the fact that the new bonds bore a total interest of about 11-5
million yen a year, whereas the market value of the 1871 stipends had been
some 22-6 million and the estimated annual value of former domain
stipends 34-6 million.
These developments led to open samurai rebellion, the more disturbing
because it centred in the areas from which the Meiji leaders themselves
had come. In February 1874 Eto Shimpei led a revolt in Hizen. Another
followed almost at once in Choshu. The most important, however, came
in Satsuma three years later. After his resignation from the government in
1873, Saigo Takamori had retired to his home province and busied him-
self with the organising of ‘schools’ for samurai, which had the double
object of creating a trained corps of military administrators and of pro-
viding for co-operative self-help. Within a short time his followers were in
virtual control of prefectural administration, able to ignore the orders of
Tokyo at will. In January 1877, after much hesitation, the government
took the first step towards bringing the area back under its control by
ordering the removal of the arms stored at the provincial capital of
Kagoshima. Saigo’s followers promptly seized the arsenal and broke into
open revolt. The campaign that followed lasted six months before Saigo,
with the remnant of his force of 15,000 men, was forced back on Kago-
shima and took his own life; and the government had to put into the field
the whole of its standing army of 32,000, with 10,000 reserves and most of
the national police.
The suppression of the Satsuma Rebellion, costly though it was, demon-
strated that feudal risings were no longer effective in a modern state, even
one as new-fledged as Japan. Samurai continued to resort to violence
from time to time, initially as leaders of peasant riots, eventually as
political assassins — a type of political action which the events of 1858-68
had made almost respectable — but the main stream of opposition to the
government thereafter was found in the so-called ‘movement for freedom
and people’s rights’ (Jiyu-minken undo). This, too, found effective leader-
ship as a result of the split within the oligarchy in 1873. Whereas men from
Hizen and Satsuma, like Eto and Saigo, took up arms to back their views,
the Tosa group, notably Itagaki Taisuke and Goto Sojiro, preferred legal
agitation to secure the creation of a representative assembly.
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The motives, as well as the limitations, of this ‘liberal’ movement are
revealed in two memorials presented by its leaders in 1 874. The first, dated
17 January, argued that the arbitrary action of those in office was alien-
ating popular support and thus endangering the state. To establish an
elected assembly would enable national unity to be achieved: ‘Then and
only then will the country become strong.’ Though this argument was
supported by references to western political philosophy, in essence it was
a challenge to the group in power, accepting the objective of achieving
national strength and disputing chiefly the means of doing so. It was not
an appeal based on the doctrine of individual rights. Indeed, when a
supporter of the government criticised the demand for an assembly as
premature, on the grounds that ‘ outside the present government officials,
there would be not more than sixty or seventy men of distinguished
ability and knowledge in the whole nation’, Itagaki and Goto replied that
they had no immediate intention of making the franchise universal. ‘We
would only give it in the first instance’, they wrote, ‘to the samurai and
the richer farmers and merchants, for it is they who produced the leaders
of the revolution of 1868.’
Thus the appeal of the movement was made directly to those elements
of the anti-Tokugawa alliance which had reason to feel disappointment at
the results of the change they had helped to bring about. Its leaders were
drawn from those domains, Tosa and Hizen, which resented the growing
predominance of men from Satsuma and Choshu in central government.
The rank-and-file at first were largely samurai from the same areas. This
was evident in the membership of the early political associations formed
to give the movement some coherence, such as the Aikokuto (Patriots’
party), organised in 1874, and the Aikokusha (Society of Patriots), which
succeeded it, still more in the Risshisha, a Tosa group consisting exclu-
sively of samurai. Potentially, however, much wider support was avail-
able in the countryside. Landlords and rural entrepreneurs, though they
had profited economically from the Restoration, welcomed the prospect of
playing a larger part in national politics and were specifically critical of
what they regarded as government favouritism of the towns in the matter
of taxation. The farmers, too, hated the land-tax. They also had a host of
other grievances, ranging from high rents to conscription and such new-
fangled amenities as schools and telegraphs. A start was made in bringing
such groups into an organised opposition with the formation of Japan’s
first modern political party, the Jiyuto (Liberal party), in October 1881.
Before this, however, the government had been forced to reconsider its
own stand on the question of constitutional development. Kido had
advocated representative institutions as early as 1873, but Okubo had
argued that the time was not yet ripe, though he agreed that the creation
of some kind of written constitution was desirable as a means of ensuring
stability and national unity. In fact, the chief difference between the views
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of Okubo and his colleagues, on the one hand, and opposition leaders, on
the other, was that the former sought a constitution which would confirm
their power, the latter one which would break it. This is clear from the
discussion of various constitutional proposals which took place among
government leaders in the period 1878-80. Ito put the point most suc-
cinctly. After analysing briefly the nature of existing opposition, he stated:
‘it is the responsibility of the government to follow a conciliatory policy
and accommodate itself to these tendencies so that we may control but not
intensify the situation, and relax our hold over government but not yield it.’
Action was precipitated by a further split within the ranks of the oli-
garchy. Since the death of Okubo in 1878 the chief rivals for over-all
leadership had been Ito, who had the support of Iwakura and the Choshu
interests, and Okuma Shigenobu of Hizen. Okuma had not at first com-
mitted himself on the constitutional issue, but in March 1881, apparently
in an attempt to use popular agitation to back his own bid for power, he
came out openly in favour of the immediate establishment of a constitu-
tion on British lines. It must, he said, include provision for an elected
legislature and for party cabinets depending on a parliamentary majority.
In June, at the instance of Ito and Iwakura, this proposal was rejected. In
October they succeeded in getting Okuma himself removed from office,
whereupon he formed a political party of his own, the Rikken Kaishinto
(Constitutional Progressive party), composed of a number of his followers
among the younger bureaucrats, a group of city intellectuals, and some of
the new industrialists, led by the great Iwasaki (Mitsubishi) concern.
Simultaneously with Okuma’s enforced resignation, Ito and Iwakura
procured an imperial edict promising that a constitution would be granted
— not immediately, as Okuma demanded, but in 1889. This had the double
advantage of blunting the opposition’s attacks and giving time for pre-
paration. Soon after, in 1882, they formed their own party, the Rikken
Teiseito (Constitutional Imperial party), but it proved weak and generally
unpopular. Much more effective were the direct measures they took
against the rival parties. The Press Law of 1 875, which made it a punish-
able offence to criticise the government, had already been used extensively
to muzzle and sometimes suppress the opposition newspapers. In 1880,
moreover, Ito had introduced laws putting political meetings under police
control and prohibiting political associations from advertising meetings,
soliciting membership, or corresponding with similar groups elsewhere.
These weapons of suppression, originally devised for use against Itagaki’s
followers, were now turned against the Kaishinto as well. They were
reinforced, often successfully, by attempts to set the two parties against
each other. Finally, in December 1887, came the Peace Preservation Law,
extending the powers of the police still farther and making it possible to
banish political suspects from the capital.
The opposition parties had not the strength to withstand such treat-
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ment. Within the Jiyuto, in particular, the effect of government regulations
against correspondence and combination was to weaken the control of
samurai leaders at the centre and enable power to pass into the hands of
local committees, dominated as a rule by landowners. Moreover, the
rural depression caused by Matsukata’s financial policy after 1881 brought
a wave of tenancy disputes, under the influence of which the peasant wing
of the party became increasingly radical in outlook and violent in action,
the landowners increasingly conservative. Facing such difficulties, Itagaki
and his colleagues decided to dissolve the party in October 1 884. At about
the same time Okuma withdrew from the Kaishinto, which was thereby
rendered harmless.
The government had meanwhile made a start on the positive side of its
policy, the preparations for issuing a written constitution. Not all these
were due to pressure from its domestic enemies or to a Machiavellian
scheme for perpetuating its own authority. In part, at least, they were a
logical stage in the attainment of political unity in modem forms, an
extension of the attack on local separatism. As Ito described the process,
the Japanese people ‘were slowly but steadily led to extend their vision
beyond the pale of their village communities, to look upon the affairs of
their districts and prefectures as their own, until finally they could interest
themselves in the affairs of state and nation as strongly as, or even more
strongly than, in the affairs of their own villages’. The first step in this
direction had been taken in 1874, with the creation of an assembly of
prefectural governors. Another came in 1878, with the addition of elected
prefectural assemblies to discuss local matters, including taxation, though
the electorate was limited and extensive powers of veto and suspension
were given to the Home Minister and his subordinates. Similar restric-
tions were put on the activities of the town and village councils established
in 1880. Since the same period saw the tightening of central control over
local officials, as well as the strengthening of the latter vis-a-vis the popula-
tion at large, it is clear that these assemblies did not reflect anything more
than a superficial relaxation of the oligarchy’s hold.
Changes in the structure of central government came after the decision
to announce a constitution and were more immediately connected with
preparations for it. First was the institution of new orders of nobility in
1884. The avowed object was to provide rewards for loyal service, but the
pointed omission of Okuma and Itagaki, despite their distinguished
careers in the administration, indicated that the move was also to provide
politically dependable members for a future House of Peers. In December
of the following year came the introduction of a modem cabinet system
on the German model, with Ito as Prime Minister, in charge of over-all
policy, and a number of department ministers each personally responsible
to the emperor. An appointed Privy Council, created in April 1888, pro-
vided yet another stronghold of oligarchic influence.
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The general shape of the constitution had already been decided by Ito
and Iwakura in July 1881 and a set of ‘general principles’ written by
Iwakura, virtually an outline of the document to be issued eight years
later, had been adopted by the Dajokan in October of that year. Hence
Ito’s famous visit to Europe in 1882-3, undertaken ostensibly to study
foreign constitutions, was in fact concerned only with deciding points of
detail. Since Iwakura’s advice had been ‘to form a cabinet with no regard
for parliament, on the model of Prussia ’, Ito naturally spent most of his
time in Berlin and Vienna, where the lectures he heard served to confirm
his preconceptions. He only made brief visits to Paris and London before
his return to Japan in the summer of 1883. Thereafter drafting of the final
text proceeded under his personal supervision and the constitution was
announced, with due ceremony, on 1 1 February 1889. It came into force
in 1890.
The Meiji Constitution made little concession to the views of Okuma
and Itagaki. It was a gift of the emperor, who reserved the right of initi-
ating revisions. Moreover, it confirmed the almost absolute powers of the
monarchy, including those of declaring war, making peace and concluding
treaties, of control over the bureaucracy and the army and navy, and of
issuing ordinances. The duties of subjects, such as those of performing
military service and paying taxes, were clear-cut. Their rights (freedom of
speech, fair trial, etc.) were subject to the provisions of the law. Even
more disturbing to the opponents of the government were the parlia-
mentary sections, for although the emperor exercised the legislative power
‘with the consent of the Imperial Diet’, ministers were not responsible to
the elected House of Representatives, while the House of Peers, inevitably
a conservative body, had in effect a veto on all bills. In the matter of
finance, all expenditures ‘involved in the exercise of the Imperial Preroga-
tive’ — subsequently defined as including those on account of the armed
forces, as well as much of the civil and military salary list — were removed
from the control of the Diet. The annual budget required the consent of
the Lower House, but if this were refused the government was empowered
to carry out the budget of the previous year. There was little chance that
the parties could use this as a means of achieving their ambitions.
The constitution, in fact, was the final step in erecting the structure of a
modem state, not a concession wrested from the government by its
opponents.
The Electoral law of 1890 prescribed tax qualifications for voting which
limited the electorate to about 450,000 out of a total population of
40 million. Because of the heavy incidence of the land-tax, landowners
comprised the largest single group of voters, a fact reflected in the first
elections (1890), when over 90 per cent of the 300 representatives in the
Lower House depended on the rural vote. Of more immediate importance
was the strength of the political parties, now reorganised. The groups led
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by Itagaki, Goto and Okuma controlled 160 seats and thus possessed
between them a majority over supporters of the government. They sought
to use this majority to win acceptance for the idea of party cabinets, a
policy to which Yamagata, the Prime Minister, and most of his colleagues
were unalterably opposed. The result was a head-on clash between the
leaders of the oligarchy and the Lower House of the Diet. From the
beginning this centred on the budget. In the first session (1890-1) the
Lower House proposed a 10 per cent cut and Yamagata succeeded in
effecting a compromise only with the aid of extensive bribery and intimi-
dation. His successor, Matsukata, faced even greater difficulties and dissol-
ved the House in December 1891, attempting to control the elections which
followed by the use of police as well as bribery. The result was a casualty
list of twenty-five dead and several hundred injured, but no important
reduction in the opposition’s strength. The struggle over the budget con-
tinued. Ito, who replaced Matsukata late in 1892, broke the deadlock
temporarily by invoking direct imperial intervention, but even so found it
necessary to dissolve the House again in December 1893 and June 1894.
A wave of enthusiasm for the war with China brought a political truce
in 1894-5. Thereafter politics began slowly to take on a new pattern. The
parties had been disillusioned by lack of success and dismayed by the
recurring cost of elections, so that a desire for the fruits of office made
them more inclined to compromise than in the past. Similarly, some mem-
bers of the oligarchy were now prepared to work with, rather than against,
the Lower House. Ito set an example by an alliance with Itagaki’s
Jiyuto in 1895, and when his government fell in 1896 it was followed by a
Matsukata-Okuma combination. Both alliances, however, were weakened
by disputes over constitutional principles and the allocation of office. As a
result there was a brief reversion to the former pattern in 1898, when the
Jiyuto and Shimpoto combined to form a single party, the Kenseito
(Constitutional party), and, on Ito’s initiative, Okuma and Itagaki formed
a joint ministry. The experiment was unsuccessful. Attempts at admini-
strative reform were blocked by the bureaucracy; the effort to frame
concrete policies brought out conflicts between the landed interests of the
Jiyuto and the city interests of the Shimpoto; problems of patronage
proved unfailingly divisive. Within a few months, before the government
had even had to face the Diet, the coalition dissolved into its component
parts. This brought Yamagata back to power in a government without
specific party affiliations.
By this time disagreements had developed between Ito and Yamagata
and the former set himself to strengthen his position by a much closer
alliance with party politicians than had been attempted so far by any
member of the oligarchy. In September 1900 he formed his own party,
the Rikken Seiyukai (Association of Friends of Constitutional Govern-
ment), consisting largely of former members of the Jiyuto. Ito’s side of
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the bargain was to ensure his followers some seats in the cabinet and a
modicum of influence over policy. In return, as he made clear in his
inaugural address, they had to abandon the principle of party govern-
ment. The upshot was that the Seiyukai, first under Ito and then under
Saionji, secured a decade of limited power — though sometimes only at the
cost of supporting ministries formed by Yamagata’s nominee, Katsura —
while the struggle to secure responsible party cabinets was side-tracked
for almost twenty years.
Political and constitutional developments after 1890 were less striking,
certainly to foreign observers, than the rapid change in Japan’s inter-
national position and prestige. This was first apparent in the matter of
treaty revision. Attempts to secure the abolition of extra-territoriality and
tariff control, both embodied in the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ of the late
Tokugawa period, became a major theme of Japanese foreign policy after
1878. In that year the United States agreed to grant Japan tariff auto-
nomy, subject to the consent of the other powers, but British opposition
brought negotiations to an end early in 1879. Talks concerning extra-
territoriality met a similar fate in 1882. In 1886 agreement was reached in
principle on the establishment of mixed courts, with both foreign and
Japanese members, to replace consular jurisdiction, but news of the com-
promise became public in Tokyo and an outburst of popular criticism
prevented any final decision. Much the same happened when Okuma, as
Foreign Minister, reopened discussions in 1888-9, this time conducting
talks in European capitals. News of the agreement was published pre-
maturely in London and again provoked violent reaction in Japan.
After these abortive attempts at compromise the attitude of Japanese
negotiators hardened. When Mutsu, Foreign Minister in the Ito govern-
ment, opened new discussions in 1893, he set himself to secure British
agreement to the total abolition of extra-territoriality. His attitude was
much more inflexible than that of his predecessors. He emphasised the
danger of again offending Japanese opinion, which was now vociferously
represented in the Diet, and even hinted that Japan might be forced to
renounce the treaties unilaterally. Despite some sharp conflicts of view,
agreement was eventually reached and a treaty signed with Britain in July
1894, providing that extra-territoriality would end in Japan one year after
promulgation of the new civil code. It took effect, as did the treaties sub-
sequently signed with other powers, in August 1899. Even so, full tariff
autonomy was not obtained until 19 11, when these treaties expired.
The note of greater confidence evident in Japanese policy under Mutsu
was still more apparent in the country’s dealings with its neighbours.
Before 1890 Japanese governments had acted with studied moderation,
especially when there was any danger of provoking conflict with one or
other of the powers, though they had successfully pressed minor territorial
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claims to the Kurile and Ryukyu islands. They had shown considerable
patience since 1873 even over the question of Korea. But in 1894
Japanese demands for the reform of Korea under Japan’s tutelage were
the immediate cause of the war between Japan and China.
The notable contrast between Japan’s policy in 1894 and that which was
followed in the similar dispute ten years earlier is made all the more
marked by the fact that Ito was Prime Minister on both occasions. In
attempting to explain the change, historians have disagreed. Some have
emphasised the greater stubbornness of Chinese policy in 1894 and the
growing importance of Japan’s economic interests in Korea during the
intervening decade. Others have sought an explanation in the political
pressures on Ito resulting from the actions of opposition parties in the
Diet. Both arguments have force, but the second, at least, is open to
objection. It is true that most party leaders had belonged to the group
which had resigned over the Korean dispute in 1873 and that they found
criticism of government ‘weakness’ in foreign policy a ready means of
gaining votes : foreign policy, after the fears aroused by western actions in
the period 1853-68, remained an issue which was always likely to arouse
emotion. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the parties were
strong enough to force their wishes on the government. A more extreme
form of pressure came from the patriotic groups, whose tastes ran to
coercion and whose plans for Japanese expansion involved a complete
rejection of that respect for western diplomatic practice to which the
Meiji government was committed. Such organisations as the Genyosha,
established in 1881 by political malcontents who had been closely con-
nected with the Satsuma Rebellion, sought to win acceptance for their
views by a mixture of wire-pulling and intimidation, but it was not until
the twentieth century that they and their successors gained an effective
voice in the shaping of Japanese policy.
A clearer understanding of Ito’s policy towards China can be obtained
if it is remembered that the decision not to attack Korea in 1873, which he
had supported strongly, was taken on the grounds that an overseas
adventure at that time would have been both dangerous and impracticable.
Similar reasoning continued to induce caution thereafter. But by 1894
the argument had lost much of its cogency and Japan’s leaders could face
the world with greater confidence. Japan had attained a fair measure of
political and financial stability. She had a growing modem industry and
commerce, a small but efficient western-style navy, an army reorganised,
especially after 1882, to become an effective instrument for use abroad.
With so much achieved, the prospect of a war in Korea could be viewed
with less concern and by that very fact became attractive. In this sense the
change in Chinese policy and the need to placate domestic opposition
were only of secondary importance. 1
1 Below, pp. 644 ff., for further details.
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The war itself went quickly in Japan’s favour. Within a few weeks she
had secured naval control of the seas between Korea and North China,
thus cutting the best route for Chinese reinforcements to the peninsula,
and by the beginning of 1 895 had occupied the whole of Korea, Port Arthur
and its hinterland in Liaotung, and parts of South Manchuria. China was
forced to seek peace terms, eventually sending Li Hung-chang to Japan to
negotiate with Ito. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki, concluded in April
1895, China agreed to recognise the independence of Korea; to cede to
Japan Formosa, the Pescadores and the Liaotung Peninsula; to open four
more Chinese cities to foreign trade; and to pay an indemnity of 200
million taels in silver. But the treaty at once provoked the intervention of
Russia, France and Germany, demanding that Liaotung be returned.
Reluctantly, the Japanese government complied and the treaty was
amended. An increased indemnity was Japan’s only consolation.
The Sino-Japanese War opened a new era for Japan, for it had im-
portant repercussions in domestic politics and economic development, as
well as in foreign affairs. The enthusiasm brought by victory and the out-
raged feelings brought by the Triple Intervention of the powers, coinciding
as they did with treaty revision, gave renewed impetus to the growth of
nationalism and made expansion, rather than the attainment of equality,
the focus of Japanese aspirations. At the same time, Japan’s emergence as
an active participant in the international affairs of the Far East involved
a complete rethinking of her position. The events of April 1895 had
demonstrated that realisation of her hopes would inevitably bring rivalry
with Russia, perhaps an open clash. For this she was by no means ready.
Much remained to be done before she could afford to reject, if necessary
at the cost of war, the ‘advice’ of one of the powers.
In the building of a strong economy a good deal had already been
accomplished. In the textile trades especially, the rapid growth after 1890
owed little to government finance or national economic policy, though the
export of textiles was greatly stimulated by the readier access to Chinese
and Korean markets resulting from the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan’s
heavy industry, however, was still far from being able to support a major
war; and it was to this sector of the economy that government attention
was now directed. The foundation of specialist banks, the Hypothec Bank
in 1896 and the Industrial Bank in 1900, provided means of channelling
investment in the desired directions. So, too, did the postal savings move-
ment. As a result, industrial growth was rapid, though it remained on a
small scale by European standards till after 1914. Paid-up capital in the
engineering industry, for example, increased from 2-6 million yen in 1893
to 14-6 million yen in 1903 and 6i-i million yen in 1913. In 1896 shipping
companies were given subsidies for the use of iron and steel vessels of
700 tons and over, while additional subsidies were granted after 1 899 to
those using Japanese-built ships. Japan’s merchant fleet and the output of
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her shipyards grew steadily: by 1903 38 per cent of the ships entering
Japanese ports were Japanese-owned, compared with only 14 per cent a
decade earlier. The iron and steel industry came into being on a significant
scale in 1901, when the government-financed Yawata Iron Works began
production. It was soon followed by a number of private concerns. Coal
production was increased from an annual average of 2-6 million metric
tons for the period 1885-94 to an annual average of 8 million metric tons
in 1895-1904.
Ten years after the Sino-Japanese War therefore the Japanese economy
was already showing significant changes. Silk and cotton textiles,
including cotton yarn, accounted for 22 per cent of exports in 1900. There
had been a corresponding increase in the imports of raw cotton, a relative
decrease in the exports of natural products like rice and tea. Population
growth had finally overtaken agricultural production and the country had
become a net importer of foodstuff's. Government expenditure had risen
threefold in a decade, largely owing to the cost of armaments and of
developing new colonial territories, with a consequent increase in taxation
and government borrowing. The national debt more than doubled between
1894 and 1903.
In so far as the nature of economic development was determined by
government policy, it was linked, both in origin and purpose, with the
international situation. On the other hand, rapid though development
was, it was not sufficiently so to encourage recklessness in foreign affairs.
Nor did the political situation at home: Japan had six different cabinets
in the six years following the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Accordingly, her
approach to foreign problems remained cautious, designed to avoid
embroilment with the powers. 1 It led, eventually, to alliance with one of
them. In Korea, which was the focus of interest until early 1898, she
made an attempt to collaborate with Russia. During the scramble for
China which began with the German seizure of Tsingtao and the Russian
lease of Port Arthur in 1898 she found herself in a difficult position.
The development threatened her own future trading prospects on the
mainland, while the Russian seizure of Liaotung rubbed fresh salt in the
wounds left by the Triple Intervention. On the other hand, she knew
herself too weak to control events or even enter the competition on her
own account. She was therefore forced to tread warily. This was equally
true of the situation resulting from the Boxer outbreaks in 1899. Japan, of
all the interested countries, was best able to provide forces for the relief of
the legations in Peking, but she feared giving offence to the powers and
therefore waited until her intervention was invited, withdrawing her
troops again as soon as was reasonably possible. Russia’s occupation of
Manchuria, however, was a different matter, for it directly threatened
Japanese interests in Korea, as well as those of the powers in China. Kato,
1 Below, pp. 658 ff., for further details.
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Foreign Minister in the Ito government, registered the strongest of pro-
tests with St Petersburg in the spring of 1901, despite his failure to secure
effective British co-operation.
It was largely from the Manchurian crisis that there arose negotiations
for an Anglo-Japanese alliance. There had been influential advocates of
an alliance in both countries ever since 1 895 and a number of tentative
discussions had taken place. Moreover, there had been co-operation in
negotiations concerning China, especially on the question of the Boxer
indemnities. All this had created an atmosphere in which some more
formal arrangement became possible, but it was still a big step from this
to the conclusion of a military alliance, even though the plan had obvious
advantages. Britain stood to gain a means of checking Russia’s advance
in the Far East and a welcome easing of the strain on her naval resources.
Japan would immeasurably increase her influence in international affairs.
Yet both also had reasons for hesitation, since the implied threat to
Russia might make it more difficult to reach a settlement with her and
thereby bring new complications. For this reason the talks which opened
in London in July 1901 proceeded slowly; Ito continued to sound out the
possibility of an agreement with Russia for some time after they had
begun; and in the final text of the Alliance the clause promising British
support for Japan’s position in Korea was carefully worded to avoid
giving undue encouragement to Japanese ambitions. Nevertheless the
Alliance was finally signed on 30 January 1902 and Japan seems on balance
to have had the best of the negotiations. For her, at least, the occasion
was one which warranted celebration.
In many ways indeed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance represents the
pinnacle of the Meiji government’s achievements. From a beginning in
uncertainty and civil war it had gradually created an administrative and
governmental structure more efficient than Japan had ever known before.
A small group of leaders, successfully resisting challenges to their own
control of this structure, had initiated far-reaching reforms in the country’s
society and economy, through which they had at last secured treaty
revision, which constituted a recognition of Japan’s formal equality in
international affairs, and had gained victory in a foreign war. Alliance
with one of the greatest of the powers set the seal on their success. Yet it
was also, in chronology if not causation, a new point of departure. In the
twentieth century Japan was irretrievably committed to playing a major
part in the affairs of the Far East; and under the pressure of expansionist
sentiment at home, the temptation of opportunity abroad, she launched
a programme of empire-building which eventually brought disaster.
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D uring the late nineteenth century the United States lost their
former place in the imagination of Europe, and by 1900 the accusa-
tions of immaturity, materialism and indiscriminate self-praise,
formerly the stock-in-trade of conservative critics, had been accepted by
the European left. In spite of attempts to treat this as an ‘age of enter-
prise’ modern Americans have been inclined to echo these criticisms, and
‘the Gilded Age’, with its implications of ostentatious wealth and intrinsic
worthlessness, remains the popular label. Yet America remained the land
of opportunity both for millions of poor European migrants and for
well-to-do investors, and Americans themselves moved from the doubts
and divisions of civil war' to self-confidence, to social stability, and to a
surprising uniformity in their fundamental beliefs. Movements of protest
and criticism appealed to a traditional stock of American principles;
proposals for radical change in the political, social and economic system
won little support. For critics and conservatives alike the American
utopia remained America.
The period was dominated by the rise of a highly developed industrial
and capitalist society in the North and Mid-West. This society experienced
internal tensions similar to those of other industrial societies, but avoided
the great fissure of politics based on class. Until the last years of the
century it did not encounter the problem of dependencies overseas, but
it faced comparable problems in its relationship with the less-developed
rural regions occupying a greater part of the territory of the United States.
The political system gave these ‘colonial’ areas participation in the
national government, encouraged alliances between groups in the different
regions, and thus mitigated the effect of overwhelming power concen-
trated in one part of the United States; but politics which were either
meaningless or corrupt often seemed to contaminate rather than to
harmonise the diverse sections of the country. In 1888 Lord Bryce in his
book, The American Commonwealth, remarked of the two great parties
that aims and principles seemed to have vanished, ‘all had been lost,
except office or the hope of it’; and a man such as James G. Blaine, who
dominated his party and commanded the devoted loyalty of a personal
following, appears in retrospect to have been superficial, careless of public
virtue, and associated with no great measure or significant policy. Yet the
American Union was a political achievement and only by the art of politics
could it be maintained
The Civil War and Reconstruction fostered new loyalties and a new
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definition of political aims, and the election of 1896 saw party conflict
identified with a real clash of interests ; the slack intervening period saw
both parties trying to broaden their basis by becoming more like each
other. After the period of emotional conflict, through that in which
parties lived on their past, the organisation of politics could become for
politicians an end in itself. What survived when ‘all had been lost’ were
a large number of autonomous local party organisations bound together
in a loose alliance with the object of electing a President. It was the busi-
ness of the successful leader to keep control of these local organisations,
staffed by minor professional politicians, and even the dignified national
figure could not avoid preoccupation with the hard facts of patronage,
influence and political manipulation. Respectable public men might come
to tolerate practices which they would condemn in private, and the system
could also raise up bosses and ‘spoilsmen’ or patronage brokers who
regarded with cynical indifference the principles which they exploited.
This system of professional politics sometimes seemed to stand apart from
the real history of America which was being made by business entre-
preneurs; but politics were entwined with the economic as with every
other aspect of national life. The pattern of power in this democratic
society was more intricate than the formal structure of government by
the people, and more complex than that of societies arranged upon a
hierarchic model.
The Republican party was in origin a movement of protest, irritation
and ideals. It emerged from the Civil War as a middle-class party drawing
upon working-class support; it included most intellectuals, and combined
idealism and reformist zeal with a vast respect for the dynamic economic
forces of the age. The Republicans recognised no conflict between welfare
and individualism, and this fact, regarded by some future commentators
as evidence of weak thinking or deliberate self-deception, was their chief
source of strength. The party did not regard itself as the servant of big
business but of the small entrepreneur, the hard-working farmer, the decent
citizen, and the virtuous poor. As the momentum of the party slackened it
came to rely increasingly upon patronage, upon the emotional memories
of the Civil War, and upon an appeal to the interests of business. A party
formed to prevent the extension of slavery came to place high tariffs in the
centre of its platform, and if it began the period with something akin to
Gladstonian liberalism it ended close to Lord Salisbury’s conservatism.
It did not however cease to claim that it was the party of nineteenth-
century enlightenment, and it was from good Republican soil that pro-
gressivism sprang in the ensuing period.
The late nineteenth century has been associated with the ascendancy of
the Republican party, but there was a Democratic majority in the House
of Representatives for nine of the eighteen congresses between 1 865 and
1901, and though the Republicans had a Senate majority in all but four
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years this was never greater than three between 1877 and 1891. In the
mid-western heartland of the Republican party Douglas had won almost
as many votes as Lincoln in i860, and this great reserve of Democratic
strength was now being supplemented by the increasing number of
foreign-born Roman Catholics and low-paid city workers. In the South
the Republican party was annihilated by 1877, and old Whigs led a
revived and monolithic Democratic party. In the North there were
reserves of Democratic strength in the cities and amongst the poorer
farmers, while a comparatively small number of wealthy men, mostly
from New York and affiliated with international banking and overseas
commerce, commanded a disproportionate influence in the party. Die aims
of each group remained fairly consistent, but the shifting balance of power,
bringing one or the other to preponderant influence, made for extreme
confusion. Die Democrat could never be sure whether he would find him-
self committed to hard money or inflation, to free trade or to modest
proposals for tariff revision, to reform or to conservatism. This incon-
sistency mattered less than might be imagined to a party which made a
virtue of political negation, and which, to quote the New York World, the
leading exponent of Democratic views in the eastern states, tried to adhere
to ‘the old Democratic doctrine. . .to permit the town to do nothing
which the school district could do as well; the state nothing which the
county or city could do; and the federal government nothing the state
could as completely and safely accomplish’ (7 March 1865). Local auto-
nomy was still attractive to those who, for one reason or another, wanted
a free hand; the Democrats might claim to be the party of the common
man but their real support came from the small vested interest and the
local power group. Thus in New York the Democratic principle of
municipal autonomy kept Tammany in the saddle, and in the South the
party became an effective weapon in the hands of the upper-class oli-
garchy. The Republicans were accused of ‘centralism’ but their real
offence, in many Democratic eyes, was to attempt protection of the
Negroes against the consequences of Southern home rule. The Democratic
party ended the century in alliance with agrarian radicals, but it had
shown little sympathy for organised labour, had little attraction for skilled
workers, was still regarded as conservative by many of its adherents, and
would have to undergo a twentieth-century metamorphosis before it could
become the vehicle for reform in an industrial age.
Both parties were trying to capture the same middle-class vote and their
national programmes often did no more than find two ways of saying the
same thing; yet there were differences of temperament and of principle
which convinced contemporaries that they were not fighting sham battles.
The Republican was the party of individuals, the Democrat of minorities.
The Democrats still believed in States’ Rights modified by the abandon-
ment of secession; the Republicans believed that States’ Rights did not
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include the right to do wrong to persons or property. The Democrats were
strong in numbers but weak in policy; the Republicans represented educa-
tion and respectability, but the precariousness of their electoral position
forced them to a concentration upon political tactics amid which public
virtue languished. Both parties tended to live on the past; but whereas the
Democrats really believed in the past the Republicans tried to exploit it.
It would be an error to assume that all men in public life were rascals,
or that business drained away all the best talent from politics. Most men
who achieved national office were respectable and many were able, while
many of those who achieved outstanding success in business would have
made poor political leaders. Nor, in anything short of a Platonic republic,
can politics expect an exclusive command over the best men. What the
United States lacked was a recognised upper class, accustomed to filling
public office and maintaining a code of gentlemanly behaviour; the defeat
of the South had driven such a class from the central position, and leader-
ship had to come from those who could make a success in the rough
school of local politics. As in earlier periods the legal profession was the
royal road into public life, but political prominence went most frequently
to the small-town lawyer with a bare professional training. Most politi-
cians maintained that their primary duty was to their constituents, but in
practice this often meant service to those who were most influential and
most vocal. The lobby and the pressure group became more and more
significant during the period, and those with a ready-made nucleus of
organisation, such as large business interests and the Grand Army of the
Republic, had a long start in the race for favours.
Congressional procedure heightened the impression that politics were
at the best a compromise of principles and at the worst a scramble for
rewards. The middle-class men who filled both Houses of Congress pro-
jected upon the political world their own sedate and businesslike habits,
and the great oratorical efforts after the style of Webster and Clay went
out of fashion. More and more work was done in committee behind
closed doors, and though more information was gathered and more
business transacted than in any previous period, the public derived from
Congress no impression of purposeful leadership. The vital function of
initiating policy, left by the Constitution in a void, was performed out of
the public eye and in an atmosphere which was liable to generate suspicion.
The attention paid to lobbyists could be justified as a necessary part of
consultation in the business of government, but it could also confirm the
belief that wealth was favoured above commonwealth. What created most
alarm was not the occasional scandal but the failure to prevent its repeti-
tion and the apparent impossibility of reconciling disinterested govern-
ment with the requirements of party organisation. State legislatures were
particularly susceptible to pressure, and some states won an unenviable
reputation for rule by the pocket-governments of great corporations. The
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prestige of the House of Representatives declined, thanks partly to rigid
rules of debate which made men prefer government by committee. There
was some gain in the reputation of the Senate; but looking at Congress as
a whole there was a widespread impression that its members were not
living up to their responsibilities.
The period began with a decided bid for legislative supremacy which
would have relegated President and Supreme Court to secondary roles in
government. The Republicans inherited the Whig tradition of Congres-
sional government — with Lincoln’s extensive powers explained though
not always justified by the exigencies of war — and the seizure of the
initiative by the Congressional majority from President Johnson in
December 1865 was not the innovation which some have deemed it. The
Joint Committee on Reconstruction might have broken new ground as a
Congressional cabinet, without executive authority but charged with the
task of digesting, preparing and proposing legislative measures. The
Tenure of Office Act of 1867 was a more direct bid for legislative supre-
macy. It reversed a decision of Congress in 1789 that though the Consti-
tution required the Senate to confirm appointments in the Federal Service,
including cabinet ministers, it left the power to dismiss with the President.
If its main provisions had not been repealed in 1 869 it would have set up the
least stable feature of the eighteenth-century British constitution — the dual
responsibility of ministers to the executive and the legislature — without
suggesting collective responsibility which had solved the British dilemma.
Finally, the impeachment of President Johnson, though ostensibly for a
breach of the Tenure of Office Act, was really for his persistence in a policy
condemned by Congress and the electorate; if successful it might have set
the precedent for a far greater degree of executive dependence upon and
responsibility to Congress. Nevertheless, the one vote which saved
Johnson from conviction by the Senate deflected the drive for legislative
supremacy, and with the accession of President Grant the majority was
ready to let relations between the two branches slip back into their
customary lack of definition. Congressional policy, so far as it was aimed
at legislative supremacy, suffered because it evolved as a series of reactions
to particular situations, with little consideration of the general problem,
and produced no definitive statement of constitutional theory.
As the head of the administration and responsible for all Federal
appointments the President had powerful weapons with which to influ-
ence Congress and to make his party what he thought it should be. For a
time this power was circumscribed by the overmighty influence of the
great ‘spoilsmen’, but it was to prove far easier for a President to break
their hold upon the party than anyone had imagined. The veto remained
as a great reserve of power in the President’s hands, and the threat to use
it could be effective in influencing legislation; few Congressmen would
waste laborious hours upon a measure which they knew to be doomed,
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and this was a power which could be defeated only on the rare occasions
when two-thirds of both houses were opposed to a particular veto. Thus
the President had resources which would be very effective when fully
exploited. In 1892 Cleveland, who had begun with a very modest con-
ception of the presidential function, used all the means at his disposal to
secure from a doubtful Congress the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act.
McKinley, a skilled political tactician, did not use such challenging
methods but was able to get most of what he wanted from Congress.
Between 1865 and 1868 the Republicans cut the President down to the
size which their traditions and political interests required; but by the end
of the century it was clear that Congress had reached and passed the
zenith of its authority and that the Presidency had great latent powers
which awaited development.
In 1865 the Republicans had a poor opinion of the Supreme Court, and
resented the idea that the Court could, by the invalidation of laws, inter-
fere with Congressional policy. There had been only two precedents for
the voiding of a Congressional Act, and the second (Dred Scott) hardly
contributed to the prestige of the Court in 1865. The decision of the Court
in ex parte Milligan — that neither the President nor Congress had the
power to order military trials out of a theatre of war — cut at the root of
Congressional policy in the South where military courts were the main
safeguard for Negro civil rights. The Nation observed editorially (vol. iv,
p. 30) that in the Dred Scott and Milligan cases the Court had departed
from its settled practice of leaving political matters to Congress and added
that ‘we cannot believe that the attempt will be repeated. If it should be,
the people will have to meet it not merely with contempt but with punish-
ment.’ In March 1868 Congress deprived the Court of jurisdiction over
appeals from military tribunals, and in 1869 the size of the Court was
enlarged to nine, which enabled President Grant to appoint two new
justices and reverse a decision which conflicted with Congressional cur-
rency policy. The Court’s acquiescence in the act of 1 868 may have saved
it from more drastic curbs, such as the requirement of a two-thirds
majority for the invalidation of a Congressional act or provision for the
re-passage by Congress of an invalidated act. Nevertheless, the constitu-
tional shift of the ensuing years was to be towards judicial legislation and
not away from it.
Even during the tenure of Chief Justice Chase (1864-73) ten acts were
invalidated. More judicial vetoes followed, and in 1895 the Court threw
out a Federal Income Tax law which was a major item of national policy.
Upon the Court fell the responsibility of deciding what Congress had
really meant by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1 887 and the Anti-Trust
of 1890, and when it had done so the result was far from that intended by
the ardent supporters of these measures. The most important piece of
legislation of the period, the fourteenth amendment, was given meanings
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which few of its sponsors had envisaged and subjected to limitations
which they had certainly meant to override. During the same period the
Court imposed drastic restrictions upon the social and economic legisla-
tion of the states. These encroachments upon legislative freedom were
possible because powerful interests feared the unfettered operation of
majority rule. In the Constitution, and in the Court which interpreted it,
the dominant groups in the industrial capitalist society saw a guarantee
for security and stability; the Founding Fathers had begun by making a
government of laws not men, but their successors now wanted laws beyond
the reach of men, and the Supreme Court, not Congress, rose to the
occasion.
If the fundamental law was to be taken out of politics there seemed to
be an equally good case for doing the same with administration. The
weakness of the central civil service and the rise, in local politics, of party
machines were largely products of early nineteenth-century democracy,
and late nineteenth-century reformers set themselves the task of checking
these manifestations of majority rule. Civil service reform, which aimed
to recruit by examination and promote on merit, became a favourite
objective for middle-class reformers and received growing support from
business men. It had to contend with the ingrained suspicion of anything
which looked like an aristocracy and with the needs of practical politi-
cians; an academic elite could easily be pictured as the worst form of
aristocracy, and one need not be a cynic to suggest that patronage was less
harmful than other means by which power in politics might be sustained.
Nevertheless by 1883 the pressure for civil service reform had become so
great that Congress passed and President Arthur (himself a reformed
spoilsman) signed the Pendleton Act ‘classifying’ a large number of posts
which were to be filled by examination and held so long as the duties were
efficiently performed. President McKinley removed a number of posts
from the classification, but by the end of the century the United States
had gone far towards the creation of a professional civil service. They
were still, however, far from the British model which inspired many
reformers : the high departmental posts remained political appointments
and there was little incentive for men of distinguished attainments to com-
pete for the lower positions ; the hold of the politicians upon a segment of the
public service had been weakened, but the patronage system had not been
broken and was perhaps stronger because less likely to produce the more
outrageous administrative scandals.
At the other end of the political scale middle-class reformers pressed
the idea of efficient, economical and honest municipal government against
the rule of bosses, rings and party machines. These local reform move-
ments sometimes achieved an early and striking success, but seldom pre-
vented the restoration of boss rule as soon as the political temperature
was lowered. The attempts of ‘good citizens’ to effect reform left some
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impression, and there is a direct link between the civil service and muni-
cipal reformers and the progressives of the next generation, but their
refusal to participate regularly in the rough and tumble of local politics,
and the limitations of their social philosophy, made their efforts sporadic
and the results superficial.
The triviality of much which passed for political controversy does not
detract from the magnitude of the real political problems. At either end of
the period — in Reconstruction and the Populist revolt — stand two great
conflicts which settled the relationship of the industrial capitalist society
to the agrarian regions of the country. Reconstruction raised two basic
problems : the future of the Negro and the future of the Union. Should
the victorious North revolutionise Southern society by insisting upon
equality between the races? Could the Union be preserved without such a
revolution? In the North President Johnson and the Democratic minority
maintained that the object of the war, the preservation of the union, had
been achieved when the South surrendered, and that the only remaining
problem was the restoration of normal government in the South and of
normal relationships between the states and the Union. This view ignored
the experience of war, the emotions generated on both sides, the great
social revolution initiated by the emancipation of the slaves, and the
emergence of a Northern conviction that the purpose of war was not
merely to restore but also to create a more perfect union. Amongst a
religious people the war had had an apocalyptic significance: blood had
been necessary for the remission of sins, the great sacrifice had trans-
cended legalistic argument, and after the long dominion of unrighteous-
ness the elect of God were once more on the march. In secular terms
Lincoln had interpreted the struggle as one for free government, and in its
first issue of 5 July 1865 the Nation, which was to become the principal
organ of the Northern intelligentsia, declared that ‘we utter no idle boast
when we say that if the conflict of ages between the few and the many,
between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion
and the sword, was not closed on the day on which Lee threw down his
arms, the issue was placed beyond doubt’. These mystical rhapsodies were
far more important than the economic aims of northern businessmen,
which some historians have stressed, though for Republicans of this genera-
tion the extension of Northern economic interests was identified with the
extension of Northern enlightenment . Even forN ortherners who experienced
neither enthusiasm nor economic ambition there remained a puzzling
and inescapable obligation : four million slaves were free and their future as
American citizens depended upon whatever dispositions the North might
make.
During the summer of 1865 Johnson proceeded with his policy of
restoration. Once the war was over it was not difficult to gather a
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majority in each Southern state ready to take an oath of allegiance to the
United States, and upon this basis Johnson invited them to set up new
governments. Though leading Confederates were exempted from his
proclamation of amnesty, he mitigated this by a generous issue of pardons.
He demanded ratification of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery,
but asked no guarantees for Negro civil rights. Under this generous but
incautious policy governments were set up and hope revived among
Southerners that, after all, they would be able to control their own future.
Meanwhile alarm was growing in the North and this was confirmed by the
election, as proposed members of Congress from the Southern states, of
prominent ex-Confederates, and by the passage of ‘black codes’ which
combined some needed social regulation for the freedmen with the
assumption of perpetual Negro inferiority. The political atmosphere when
the momentous thirty-ninth Congress met in December 1865 was anxious
and angry. Southerners and their Northern Democratic allies saw restored
power almost within their grasp; on the other side the old abolitionists
were profoundly shocked by the abandonment of the Negroes to their
former masters, moderate Unionists were perturbed by the prospect that
Southerners (with increased representation since a Negro would no longer
be counted as three-fifths of a man for the purpose of Congressional
apportionment) might resume their former dominance in the nation, and
good party men feared that Republicans might become a minority in the
country. Not all these fears were inspired by high motives, but all were
human and comprehensible, and it is unnecessary to predicate a bitter
measure of Northern vindictiveness to understand Republican policy.
This policy was to wrest control of reconstruction from the President, and
to formulate a programme which would incorporate the safeguards which
were deemed necessary.
The situation brought to the fore the Radical Republicans who had
some of the characteristic of that determined minority which is necessary
to the success of all revolutions. Charles Sumner, who had represented
the New England conscience since 1850 and who combined an ardent love
of humanity with a very imperfect understanding of human beings, led the
Radicals in the Senate. In the House Thaddeus Stevens, a man of narrow
but dominant personality, established an extraordinary ascendancy.
Stevens knew all the arts of politics and used them without stint, but
a contemporary, Whitelaw Reid, found the secret of his strength ‘in that
source to which mere politicians so seldom look — his high, all-embracing
devotion to a noble idea’.
The ‘noble idea’ of the Radicals was racial equality; but they had to
work with colleagues who lacked the same conviction, and the first phase
of Congressional Reconstruction, leading up to the fourteenth amend-
ment, was a compromise. The amendment attempted to drive from leader-
ship the old ruling class of the South by disqualifying from public office
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all those who had once taken the oath of allegiance to the United States
(as office-holders or legislators) and subsequently joined the rebellion. It
met the vexed question of suffrage and apportionment by leaving the right
to enfranchise with the states, but reduced proportionately their Congres-
sional representation if any group of adult males were disenfranchised. It
was, however, the first clause in the amendment which effected a constitu-
tional revolution by placing civil rights under national protection; it
prohibited the states from making any law which ‘abridged the privileges
and immunities of the citizens of the United States’, or deprived ‘any
person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law ’, or denied
‘to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws’.
Congress was given the power to enforce this amendment, and cases
arising under it could be heard in the Federal courts. Charles Sumner
believed that the National government had always possessed such power
(though prevented from using it by the slavocracy); others derived it from
the thirteenth amendment which in abolishing slavery also gave to
Congress the ‘ power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation ’ ; but
the fourteenth amendment removed all doubts by nationalising civil
rights. The wheel had swung a full circle from the time when the states were
regarded as the natural protectors of individual rights against national
authority; and federalism, as the old constitution had understood it, was
dead.
Acceptance of the amendment by the Southern legislators would prob-
ably have been considered by the Congressional majority as sufficient
ground for their readmission; but in every Southern state save Tennessee
it was rejected by overwhelming majorities. The first phase of Congres-
sional reconstruction was thus brought to a dead halt, but Republican
objectives remained unchanged and the instrument for their realisation
lay at hand. Pressed by the old abolitionists, rejected by the moderates,
Negro suffrage had been waiting in the wings for exactly this opportunity.
The intransigence of Southern whites, together with an overwhelming
victory for the Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1866,
confirmed Radical leadership and inaugurated the second phase of
Congressional reconstruction. The Reconstruction Acts passed in 1867
ended the existing Southern state governments, restored military rule, and
instructed the military commanders to call constitutional conventions
elected by all adult males save those whom the fourteenth amendment
had intended to disqualify from office. The conditions on which a state
could be readmitted to the Union were the inclusion of adult male suffrage
in its constitution, the ratification of the fourteenth amendment by the
legislature, and the passage of the amendment into law by the consent of
a sufficient number of states. The work of reconstruction was crowned by
the fifteenth amendment which enacted that the right to vote could not be
abridged ‘on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude’,
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thus enacting not universal suffrage but what contemporaries called
impartial suffrage, leaving the state free to impose any voting qualifica-
tions which applied equally to all races. Technically the programme
sketched by the Reconstruction laws was a success. New constitutions
were written upon the best Northern models ; Negroes took their places as
state legislators, as executive officers, and even as Congressmen ; by June
1868 seven states had qualified for re-admission and by June 1870 all the
former rebel states were restored to the Union. The renaissance of seces-
sionist power had been checked, colour-blind democracy had been intro-
duced, the Republican party and the Union rested upon a solid and
devoted Negro vote, and the whole structure was knit together by a new
grant of national power. All that had been left out of account was the
attitude of the Southern white people.
The completeness of the political revolution, which brought colour-
blind democracy to the South at a time when the English agricultural
labourer had no vote, concealed serious weaknesses. Thaddeus Stevens
had hoped to build Negro democracy upon the sound Jeffersonian basis of
freehold land, but Congress had ignored his proposal for the confiscation
of rebel estates and their distribution among the freedmen. The majority
of Negro farmers ended as share-croppers ; occupying land but committing
half their crop to the landowner for rent, and probably mortgaging the
rest to a merchant in payment for supplies. Thus the economic ascendancy
of the upper class was assured at a time when it was politically alienated
by disqualification from office and the taxation of property by the repre-
sentatives of the propertyless. While the mass of Negroes remained low-
grade peasants the emergence of a small Negro middle class intensified
the resentment of the poorer whites and the threat of racial amalgamation
played upon deep-seated emotions. The history of Reconstruction also
became entangled with a grim economic struggle which brought specula-
tive business into the political arena without attracting to the new govern-
ments the support of stable interests. Ruined planter families grasped at
whatever opportunities offered; a few linked their fortunes with the
Reconstruction regime, but the majority preferred to bet upon a restora-
tion of white supremacy; and whatever course they took brought them
into competition with the speculative Northerners who came South to
investigate stories of undeveloped resources, dirt-cheap labour, and
favours to be won from state legislatures. A candid study of the Recon-
struction governments would probably reveal more goodwill and sounder
notions of public responsibility than has usually been credited to them —
what has survived is the story which white Southerners wanted to
believe— but there was petty pilfering, a few major scandals, and much
inexperience. Negro suffrage had been defended in a traditional American
way as the protective device by which a poor man could secure his rights,
and against such an argument the ignorance of Negro voters had little
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relevance; but it became obvious and important when Negro democracy
was called upon to fulfil the functions of positive government. The circum-
stances of the times forced these untried administrations to act more like
modern governments than anything which the South had known before;
they had to tax, borrow and spend; to underwrite economic recovery and
attract capital; to provide for relief and inaugurate systems of public
education. Much of their work, like the constitutions under which they
existed, lived on after their downfall, and the ‘new’ South owed more than
it cared to admit to the stimulation of ‘carpet-bagger’ activity; but the
responsibilities were too great for inexperienced men pulling against the
tide of tradition. Southern reconstruction was to become a classic
example of a revolution which failed.
War and reconstruction had weakened the cohesion of Southern
society, and for the time being there was only force — wielded either by
Federal troops or by illegal white-protection societies such as the notorious
Ku-Klux-Klan — to impose order upon anarchy. Out of the ruins of the
old a new society had to be created, and for its new social compact two
opposed bodies of ideas were presented : one based upon racial equality
and the promises of the Declaration of Independence; the other based
upon white supremacy and an idealised picture of the old South. Yet
while one half of the Southern mind looked resolutely backward, the other
half welcomed an economic revolution which would enable the South to
recover what it had lost on the field of battle. With the restoration and
extension of the railway system, the revival of cotton culture, the increase
in the number of cotton mills, and the development of iron, steel and coal
the South entered upon an industrial revolution which was unique in
attracting the enthusiastic support of both old landed families and white
labour. With the coming of this economic revolution certain of the old
leaders added to their family prestige the power to bargain and to direct.
As early as 1870 the counter-revolution was under way in most Southern
states, and once the ‘ redeemers ’ united popular support with economic
influence the problem of Negro suffrage was comparatively easy to solve.
The threat of force, economic coercion, and social pressure kept the
Negroes from the polls or forced them to vote Democratic. Old planter
Whigs and back-country farmers sank their traditional antipathy and
joined their forces to sweep the Democratic party to victory. By 1876
Republican governments survived in only three states, and each of these
depended upon Federal troops. Their withdrawal in the following year
ended Republican rule in the South.
‘Redemption’ in the South, though spontaneous and indigenous,
depended for its success partly upon the waning of Northern enthusiasm.
Though the Ku-Klux-Klan outrages kept indignation alive and facilitated
the passage of laws to enforce the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments,
radicalism became less confident and drifted into division. In 1872
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Sumner and other of the old abolitionists were found in the Liberal
Republican movement which favoured reconciliation with the South,
though not at the expense of the Negro, and without them Radicalism
tended to become merely the political strategy of the Republican party.
As the prospects of success receded there was less and less willingness to
reinforce failure. In 1875 Congress did pass a Civil Rights Act (for which
Sumner had fought until his death in the preceding year), but the debates
indicated the reluctance of Congress to regulate individual behaviour in
the only way which would make civil equality a reality. In 1883 the
Supreme Court confirmed these doubts by invalidating the Act; and in
1896 it decided that the ‘equal protection of the laws’ of the fourteenth
amendment was compatible with racial segregation, provided that the
facilities were ‘separate but equal’. In 1890 the Senate refused to pass an
act to enforce the fifteenth amendment. The Radical experiment in colour-
blind democracy had failed, and the Southern white majority had won
‘home rule’. Behind the liquidation of radicalism lay the formation of a
conservative alliance, which was to be of great significance for the future.
Northern business, finding that reconstruction was a losing bet, turned to
Southern business; Southern leaders anxious to preserve the counter-
revolution turned to Yankee conservatives. In politics Northern con-
servatives would cease to agitate upon the race question, while Southern
conservatives would stifle agrarian attacks upon business leadership; in
business local autonomy was given to Southern leaders but ultimate control
would rest with the great entrepreneurs and financiers of the North. This
unwritten conservative alliance, which was to dominate Congress and
particularly the Senate for many years to come, may seem materialistic,
calculating and often inhumane, but it is fair to remember that it suc-
ceeded where Radicalism had failed, in making a significant contribution
to the restoration of national unity.
For the remainder of the century Southern domestic politics made little
impact upon the national scene, for, whatever happened, the Southern
states continued to be represented by Democrats, and outside his own
section only a crudity of manner distinguished the Southern radical from
the upper class or ‘bourbon’ leader of redemption. The memory of
Reconstruction sublimated normal economic and social conflicts, and
when agrarian radical movements gathered momentum in the later years
of the century the key to their success was the alliance of political dis-
content with racial extremism. It was the victory of back-country farmers
under rural demagogues within the Democratic party which led to the
imposition of rigid and legalised segregation and to the virtual dis-
enfranchisement of the Negro. After ‘ redemption ’ Negroes continued to
vote in some numbers, ‘bourbon’ ascendancy in the ‘black belt’ depended
in part upon the Negro vote, and there were a few Negro members of state
legislatures. This situation was ended by the imposition of suffrage qualifi-
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cations which did not contravene the fifteenth amendment, but which were
administered with the intention of defeating its objects. Literacy, pro-
perty and tax-paying qualifications were applied at the discretion of state
authorities to disenfranchise Negroes while permitting poor whites to
vote; as Ben Tillman of South Carolina remarked at the Constitutional
Convention of South Carolina in 1895, the registration officer ‘is respon-
sible to his conscience and his God ; he is responsible to nobody else It
is just showing partiality, perhaps, or discrimination.’
Thirty years after ruin and defeat the Southern whites had recovered
their self-respect, the economy was more diversified than ever before, and
the Northerners had ceased their efforts to rearrange society. For this
achievement a price had to be paid. The new order depended upon evasion
of constitutional amendments which represented reasonable deductions
from the American political tradition; and this created an unhealthy
atmosphere. The glorification of the past prevented Southerners from
facing the real problems of the future. In reaction against reconstruction
activity the state governments were niggardly and limited in their activities.
The public education systems created by the reconstruction governments
made some headway, but not without the stimulation of private charity,
and the results were still meagre compared with the well-established
systems of northern and western states. None of the Southern states had
compulsory school-attendance laws and illiteracy was still common among
both races. As in earlier periods the South attracted few immigrants.
Amid the disease, poverty and ignorance of backward rural areas many
Southerners still lived in an eighteenth-century world, uncontaminated by
factories, schools, or modern medicine, and the state governments had
done very little to remedy these conditions. Inevitably the heaviest price
was paid by the Negroes whose poverty and degradation seemed to justify
racial inequality. Yet no one could seriously maintain in 1900 that the
Negroes had been better off under slavery, and harsh discriminatory laws
were often mitigated by kindly relations between the races. A small Negro
middle class had been slowly emerging, and it was here that the greatest of
Negro leaders, Booker T. Washington, saw the best hope for his race. He
argued against political agitation, and for education, enterprise and the ac-
cumulation of wealth. A passionate desire for equality had never animated
more than a small minority of Negroes, and it was more in keeping with
their temperament and with practical possibilities to show that a Negro
was just another kind of good American. Like other groups with cause
for discontent the Negroes appealed to American traditions and not away
from them; there is perhaps no more convincing proof of the attractive
force of American ideals.
Unlike the South the other great rural region, the Great Plains,
accepted the intellectual assumptions of Northern society but tried to
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reject economic control. The migrants who flooded west in great numbers
after the Civil War went in quest of independence; yet no region was more
dependent upon the resources of a developed capitalist civilisation. The
great plains were arid, contained few natural communications and were
remote from their markets. Not only prosperity but even subsistence
depended upon railways, large-scale marketing organisations, banking
facilities and manufactures. Whatever dreams the Homestead Act of 1862,
which gave 160 acres free to bona fide settlers, might have inspired, the
farmer found himself caught in the network of capitalist economy and at
the mercy of forces which he could neither understand nor control. If
small farming was precarious, considerable profit could be made from
large-scale wheat or cattle farming, and this provided a powerful incentive
for the evasion of those provisions in the Homestead Act which limited
ownership to 160 acres and conveyed a freehold title after five years’
occupation and cultivation. The railway land grants already formed an
exception to the homestead rule and these with land won through evasions
of the act contributed to great land-holdings often owned and controlled
by capitalist interests outside the region. At the same time the western
farmer had the numbers, if they could be politically organised, to oppose
the intrusive power of large-scale capitalism, and a national association
for farm education and co-operation, known as the Grange, moved into
politics with considerable success. The main target for agrarian agitators
were the great railway corporations which had been liberally endowed
with land, made districts in which they held a monopoly subsidise with
high freight rates the long-distance competitive runs, and often showed
a more lively interest in quick profits than in the long-term development
of the regions which they served.
Regulation of the railways became one great theme of agrarian radi-
calism ; the other was currency reform. The spectre of Wall Street and hard
money stood behind high interest rates, the refusal to lend, foreclosures,
and the transformation of the independent freeholder into the tenant of
some remote corporation. Moreover the attack upon the gold standard
was symptomatic of a profound difference between the agrarian west and
the industrial east, for the real debate was over the means by which capital
could be supplied. Western farmers had good ground for believing that
the financial system unduly restricted the flow of capital to their rural
section — hindering expansion and magnifying distress — but there was
equal force in the argument that industrial expansion depended upon the
supply of foreign capital, which would be repelled by inflationary policies.
Thus there was a real clash of interest which imparted passion and emo-
tional significance to the debate: on the one hand agrarian radicals saw
‘sound’ money as a symbol of the mysterious external forces which they
were trying to control, on the other adherence to gold came to stand for
all that was civilised, rational and progressive, and currency reform was
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linked in the timid eastern mind with violence, anarchism and retro-
gression.
The demand for easy money had deep roots in American history but
its immediate antecedents were found during the war and after, and in
the east rather than the west. The Civil War had been financed in part by
the issue of greenbacks, an inconvertible paper currency, and despite
depreciation they were popular with those who did well out of the war —
with manufacturers, commercial farmers and speculative businessmen —
and unpopular with New York bankers, import merchants, and men on
fixed incomes. Henry Carey, the best-known of American economists,
favoured the continuance of government-managed paper currency as an
element in a national economic system isolated by a protective tariff from
the competition of cheap labour; and immediately after the war the
greenbacks had the powerful support of radicals such as Thaddeus
Stevens, William Kelley and Ben Butler. The question was confused with
that of the National Debt, and easy money was somewhat discredited in
Republican eyes by the Democratic adoption, in 1868, of the ‘Ohio Idea’
for the payment of the debt in paper currency. In spite of this. Republican
majorities in Congress refused to sanction an immediate contraction of
the greenbacks, which would have restored them to par and paved the way
for resumption of specie payments; instead they adopted a compromise
by which the currency would become convertible when the increased
volume of business brought the greenbacks to par. The onset of depres-
sion in 1873 postponed the realisation of this policy and created a demand
for new paper issues as a measure of relief ; but Grant vetoed a bill em-
bodying such a measure and in consequence the Republicans became
more firmly committed to resumption, which finally took place in 1879.
Meanwhile the centre of gravity for currency reform had shifted west,
and it was in the western states that the short-lived Greenback-Labor
party, formed in 1877, found most of its support. This movement co-
incided with a period of modest agricultural prosperity from 1879 to 1884;
but in the latter year a fall in prices began which was not checked until
1896, and in 1887 began a prolonged drought which brought ruin to many
western farms. This period saw the rise of the greatest movement of
agrarian discontent, which culminated, in 1892, with the formation of the
Populist party at Omaha, Nebraska. In the preamble to the Populist
party platform of 4 July 1892, Populism drew together all the strands of
western discontent and challenged the dominant forces in American
society with the statement that ‘ we meet in the midst of a country brought
to the verge of moral, political and material ruin The fruits of the toil
of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few
From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two
great classes — tramps and millionaires.’ Populism did not stop short at
rhetoric but proposed the public ownership of railways, a graduated
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income tax, the direct election of senators, democratic control through
local initiative and referendum, and the restriction of immigration in the
interests of labour. The greatest attention was however focused upon the
currency question and upon a demand for the unlimited coinage of silver.
Before the war the United States had been on a bimetallic standard, but
as the official ratio had over-valued silver it had not gone into circulation
and in 1873 the coinage of silver was dropped. In the following years
production from the new western silver mines brought down the price and
it would have been profitable to sell to the mint at the old silver/gold ratio
of 16 to 1. The use as currency of a precious metal which was also an
American asset seemed to avoid the disadvantages of an inconvertible
paper currency, and provided an inflationary theory which could easily
be expressed in terms of popular jargon. Congress proved responsive to
silver agitation and in 1 890 passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which
fed silver into the currency without adopting it as a standard. The measure
was bitterly criticised by orthodox sound-money men, who protested that
any approach to bimetallism would be disastrous so long as London, the
world’s money market, was wedded to gold.
At the height of the Populist agitation a Democratic President, Grover
Cleveland, sat in the White House. The Democrats had for long been torn
between sound- and easy-money men, but thanks to the influence of New
York in the party all the presidential candidates had been sound-money
men and Cleveland was no exception. In 1893 a sharp economic crisis
precipitated a drain of gold from the country. This was intensified by the
operation of the Silver Purchase Act, under which men could bring silver
to the mint, sell it for legal-tender paper, and convert the paper into gold,
which could then be exported at a considerable profit. Cleveland forced
the repeal of the act through Congress, and concurrently made a deal with
J. P. Morgan to replenish the country’s gold reserve; this reversion to hard
money and the alliance with high finance split the Democratic party and
led to a revolution in policy. At the National convention of 1896 the party
made an abrupt jump into agrarian radicalism by nominating William
Jennings Bryan of Nebraska on a ‘free-silver’ platform. Bryan’s oratory
had carried the day, and it was in a fit of splendid emotion that the
assembled party delegates responded to his exhortation that ‘you shall
not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’. With some reluctance the
Populists endorsed Bryan who had committed himself to none of their
demands save free silver, and the stage was set for the most momentous
and exciting election since 1861. Agriculture was arrayed against industry,
agrarian demagogues against bankers, and the less-developed depend-
encies against the highly developed ‘homeland’. The Republicans closed
their ranks in defence of a policy initiated by an eastern Democrat, and the
Democrats gathered the fruit of discontent propagated by the homestead
policy of western Republicans.
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The Republican candidate, William McKinley, said little and won
unprecedented and enthusiastic support from business interests. Bryan
spoke much, rousing passionate response in rural areas, losing con-
servative eastern Democrats, and making little impression upon skilled
industrial labour. Business propaganda, coupled with some economic
coercion, cannot alone account for the Republican victory. Bryan carried
every purely rural state by great majorities, but in all those where industry
was significant he lost votes which had gone to Cleveland in 1892. Oppo-
sition to Bryan united intellectuals with businessmen, and it was claimed
that the university faculties were solid for McKinley ; most of those who
subsequently became prominent in the Progressive movement voted
Republican and so, probably, did a majority of trade unionists. Republi-
can victory settled the future course of American history, for never again
would agrarian radicalism capture a major party or seek to control the
nation. If populism had anticipated some of the characteristics of later
liberalism it was also provincial, anti-intellectual, anti-semitic, opposed to
foreign immigration, and impregnated with romantic intolerance. It had
stabbed away at many of the problems which perplexed America, but it
had evolved no coherent philosophy for a country in which industry was
essential and in which urban population grew every year.
On 16 January 1865 in the House of Representatives that vigorous
radical William G. Kelley, old abolitionist, friend of labour, greenbacker
and ardent protectionist, spoke to Congress about the new age which was
dawning. ‘History’, he exclaimed, ‘is not repeating itself. We are un-
folding a new page in national life. The past has gone forever.’ Written
upon this new page Kelley saw the popular press, the telegraph, the rail-
way, industrial invention, homestead laws, the welcome given to destitute
immigrants, the American Missionary Society, the emancipation of the
slaves, the common school, and the dissemination of knowledge by cheap
printed books. This was as good a summary as any of the things which con-
vinced members of the Northern and Mid-western society that they were
riding in the van of progress. The suspicion that the American experi-
ment had failed when it plunged into civil war hardly penetrated the minds
of this buoyant generation, and if some were aware of the deficiencies of
American culture, only a tiny minority developed nostalgic yearnings for
Europe. Nor was American culture failing to develop its own resources :
despite the poor reputation of the press every region possessed newspapers
which were informative and responsible; periodicals such as Harper's,
Century, Forum and the Atlantic Quarterly were among the best in their
respective fields; and American universities were beginning to create a
system of graduate training which was to be a focal-point of twentieth-
century scholarship.
In this new society the centre of the stage was taken by the emergent
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class of businessmen. Seen at their worst in association with politics, their
real strength lay in small towns where they were the creators of prosperity,
local benefactors, and organisers of communal activities. The apparent
contradiction, which a later generation delighted to discover, between
sharp practice and pious charity, was hardly noticed ; a man was despised
for acting against his own interest in a business transaction but he was also
expected to give time, energy and money to voluntary and charitable work.
Whether these social activities sprang from natural altruism or from social
pressure, they led to surprising results. The harsh structure of economic
power was underwritten by a network of social obligations, and even the
fraternal associations, in which businessmen began to enjoy their separate
existence as a class apart, were ostensibly devoted to humane and charit-
able objectives. If the ordinary businessman was expected to act in this
way, the man of great wealth was expected to give munificently. Hospitals,
universities, museums, public parks, and finally the philanthropic founda-
tions of the modem times were by-products of nineteenth-century wealth
and the projects of nineteenth-century businessmen. Andrew Carnegie’s
Gospel of Wealth, published in 1889, provided a rational justification for
habits of giving which sprang from American communal behaviour; con-
vinced that men of great wealth were inevitable in and beneficial to a
healthy society, Carnegie was nevertheless disturbed by the price paid for
their ascendancy. His remedy was that the rich man should regard him-
self as the trustee of wealth for the community, with the duty of organising
its redistribution into those channels, such as medicine, education and
culture, where it would contribute to the permanent betterment of man-
kind. Pious admonitions addressed to powerful individuals have been
placed at a discount in twentieth-century thought, but it is impossible to
understand late nineteenth-century America without realising the effect
which they had upon plutocratic behaviour. To European critics, and to
many subsequent writers, the American businessman appeared narrow,
cmde, and aware of no value save that of the dollar; to his fellow towns-
man he could be a benevolent oligarch and the pride of the community in
which he had risen.
Engaged upon their separate pursuits members of this business civilisa-
tion were nevertheless conscious of a common purpose. The guiding
Providence of Protestant Christianity, classical economics, and the new
theory of evolution merged together in the belief that there was a natural
order, that within it the dynamic forces of mankind were utilised and
harmonised, and that competitive struggle led to the betterment of man-
kind. This complex of moral, political and economic ideas has been tied
together with the generic title of laissez-faire, though the economic doc-
trine of non-interference by the state was only one aspect in the thought
of a generation which was mesmerised and constantly reassured by man’s
effort to improve his condition. Reassurance was sometimes needed, for
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there were intellectual and practical difficulties to be overcome. If the
natural equilibrium ensured that a man unconsciously served humanity in
serving himself, did this mean that avarice and a ruthless use of power
ought to be condoned? If the natural order was the automatic and irre-
sistible regulator of human destiny, must men abjure that portion of then-
reason which taught men collectively to control their environment? Must
politicians endowed with the power to act voluntarily abstain from its
use? Was individualism compatible with the survival of the fittest? Ulti-
mately these questions would drive intellectuals either to an acceptance of
collectivism, exercised by the state or by the great corporations, or to
angry exhortations and gloomy prediction as men rebelled against the
tyranny of a theory which seemed as wasteful and as callous as the bio-
logical struggle for existence upon which it depended for its analogies.
Intellectual orthodoxy tended to invest with the attributes of nature the
hypotheses of economic science, and even so artificial a contrivance as the
gold standard became a part of the natural law. Most intellectuals ac-
claimed the dogmatic optimism of Herbert Spencer even while his assump-
tions were being challenged by events. After the great depression began in
1873 it was difficult to believe wholeheartedly in the beneficence of un-
controlled economic activity, and after the strikes and attendant violence
of 1877 it was difficult to believe in the natural harmony of society. In
rural slums and great cities the numbers of the very poor increased and
their condition seemed to become more degraded. The small businessman
complained of unfair competition from monopolistic giants, and John D.
Rockefeller, reflecting in later life upon the formation of his Standard Oil
Trust in 1882, observed that ‘The day of combination is here to stay.
Individualism has gone, never to return.’ If self-made magnates could still
be reconciled with a society of equal opportunity, it was more difficult to
justify John Pierpont Morgan, who exercised enormous financial power
from a remote upper-class world. But the pressure exerted by economic
change produced less dramatic results than it did in other industrial
societies; the ‘safety valve’ of American society, which some have seen in
the existence of unsettled western land, was the range of opportunity
offered by technological revolution, vast untapped natural resources and
a rapidly expanding home market. For the ambitious American there was
always some pursuit more profitable than political agitation. Neverthe-
less, the problems fed anxieties which lay beneath the surface of this
self-confident society.
The most influential critic of the new American order was Henry George,
whose Progress and Poverty was published in 1879. George forced atten-
tion upon ‘the great enigma of our times’, which was the persistence of
poverty despite wonderfully increased productivity. Here was a problem
which economic theory ought to solve but had evaded. George retained
an ardent belief in the benefits of competitive capitalism provided that its
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defects could be isolated and cured; his own analysis led him to the con-
clusion that the root of the evil lay in the private ownership of land, which
he believed to be the source of all wealth. As a remedy he proposed not
confiscation but a tax on land values replacing all other forms of taxation,
transferring to the treasury the increment in value won by labour and
skill, and making government ‘merely the agency by which the common
property was administered for the common benefit’. His ideas attracted
many followers and form a strong though often unacknowledged under-
current in modem social thought, but the force of his passionate attack
upon unnecessary poverty tended to become lost in technical arguments
over the single tax. More profound but less influential was Dynamic
Sociology, the work of a civil servant and scientist named Lester Ward,
which appeared in 1883. Ward distinguished between human and natural
evolution and maintained that human reason should control society and
not submit to its irrational forces. He placed the human power to direct
and control within the natural order, and thus provided a solution to the
dilemma of evolution.
The laissez-faire model received a more damaging blow from the
political pressure of interests and organised numbers. The history of the
protective tariff, having been written by free-traders, has been represented
as the imposition of an unpopular and unsound policy by vested interests.
In fact the tariff had a long history in several regions as a popular vote-
winning policy, and its popularity increased with the rise of industry;
organised labour generally supported it, and even the farmer wanted equal
protection rather than no protection. Clearly some interests were not
well-served by high tariffs, but it is necessary to discount the moralistic
tone with which their case was presented. If the Americans wished to
monopolise the benefits of the world’s largest free-trade area, there was
no particular reason why they should not do so provided that they were
prepared to pay the price. The success of protectionists is indicated by the
average level of duties on specific articles which rose from 47 per cent in
1869, to 49-5 per cent in 1890 and, after some relaxation during Cleveland’s
administration, to 57 per cent in 1897.
If non-intervention broke down at one end, an idea that capitalism
ought to be regulated crept in at the other. Distrust of monopoly was an
old American tradition, and the older generation of Americans saw no
limit to the economic activities of the state save those expressly laid down
in the Constitution. The school of thought which held that the Constitu-
tion ought to provide for the inviolability of free enterprise had to have
time to mature, and at first the drive by western Grangers to regulate the
activities of corporations aroused some sympathy outside their own
section. The Granger laws were brought to a test case in 1876 in Munn v.
Illinois, when a majority of the Court agreed with the opinion of White,
C.J., that ‘property does become clothed with a public interest when used
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in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community
at large’. This doctrine permitted a wide range of state regulation, but an
opposing view gained ground, and for the remainder of the century the
Court was concerned to close the door which it had opened. In 1 873 the
Court resisted the argument that the privileges and immunities protected
by the fourteenth amendment included the right to pursue a trade without
legislative interference, but by 1890 it had come to accept the view that
regulation might amount to deprivation of property without due process
of law which the amendment forbade to a state. In 1886 the Court
decided that a corporation as a ‘person’ was entitled to the protection
of the amendment. Another blow at state regulation rested upon an
interpretation of the commerce clause, giving Congress exclusive juris-
diction over interstate commerce, and thus making it difficult if not
impossible for states to regulate the activities of great corporations
operating in several states.
From the outset there was confusion in defining the aims of regulation.
The objective might be the protection of the consumer against monopoly
or of the small businessman against ‘unfair’ competition. For the first
a straightforward process of supervision and regulation would be suffi-
cient, but the second would require the enforcement of a code of fair
competition; either public authority was to be introduced as arbiter of the
price mechanism without dictating the form of capitalist enterprise, or
free competition was to be made compulsory by the abolition of mono-
poly. Late nineteenth-century policy took both roads ineffectively and
with inadequate administrative agencies, but the precedents created were
of great significance for the future.
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 followed the first principle of
regulation, and brought the Federal government into the field from which
the states had been excluded by the Supreme Court. It set up a Federal
Commission with the duty of supervising interstate railways, but it did not
specifically confer the power to fix rates and this was quickly denied to it
by judicial interpretation. The judges were suspicious of a constitutional
innovation which combined executive, judicial and legislative power, and
by the end of the century the commission had been confined largely to
the collection and publication of railway statistics. The Sherman Anti-
Trust Act of 1890 wrote into the law the enforcement of competition. Its
passage was stimulated by the publicity given to Rockefeller’s Standard
Oil Trust, which had come to control most of the country’s oil-refining,
and it declared flatly that ‘every contract, combination in the form of trust
or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the
several states, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal’.
The Act was constructed on a quite different principle from the Interstate
Commerce Act ; it made a change in statute law, left its enforcement to the
courts, and placed the responsibility for prosecution primarily with the
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law officers of the Federal government. It had respectable antecedents in
the old common law principle that contracts in restraint of trade were
void, but the difficulty lay in language which was at once too precise and
too vague. A literal outlawry of all combinations in restraint of trade
might embrace normal business agreements to which no one could object,
while the prosecutor was forced to prove restraint against the plausible
defence that combination had been followed by expansion and greater
efficiency. There was therefore a genuine difficulty in the interpretation of
the act and the Court need not be blamed for giving defendants the
advantage of the most favourable interpretation. There was also a reluct-
ance, on the part of Cleveland’s and McKinley’s administrations, to
prosecute, and during this period big business found more effective
methods of organisation. A traditional obstacle to combination was
the provision, normal in state charters, that a corporation could not
hold the stock of another corporation; the Trust, by which the stock-
holders in nominally separate companies yielded their interest to a body
of Trustees, was at the best a cumbersome device, and when the state of
New Jersey rescinded the old provision in its charters, the business mag-
nates were able to incorporate holding companies which then acquired
the stock of operating subsidiaries. The first decade after the Anti-Trust
Act saw an acceleration rather than a check to consolidation, and a para-
doxical effect of the act was that small companies which executed a trade
agreement might be successfully prosecuted while an industrial giant
could escape. Despite the disappointing history of these two great
measures for the regulation of capitalist enterprise, important principles
had been established: the acts were on the statute book and could be
implemented or extended; Congress had decided and the courts had
admitted that there ought to be rules for the conduct of business ; and an
important step had been taken towards the definition of these rules by
public authority.
Regulated capitalism was an attempt, shared between agrarian radicals
and small businesses, to restore the world of the small entrepreneur, but at
one stage the whole employer class was almost forced on to the defensive,
and in 1886 an observer who believed in the coming class-struggle might
have predicted that it was about to be fought out on American soil. In
that year a great labour organisation known as the Knights of Labour,
claiming over 700,000 members and embracing both skilled and unskilled,
had just won some spectacular struggles with employers, and showed
signs of moving into the political field. At the same time recent German
immigration had brought many socialists and anarchists, whose influence
seemed to be on the increase. However, the strength of the Knights con-
cealed the real difficulties of organising labour in a country where educa-
tion and opportunity drained off potential leaders, where small property
owners preponderated politically, where the gap between skilled and
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unskilled was widened by racial and religious differences, and where
agitation was seen as a threat to society against which all the resources of
the law must be mobilised. In this situation the influence of foreign
agitators was particularly unfortunate for respectable unionism, and this
was dramatised when a bomb outrage at Chicago in 1 886 discredited the
whole labour movement. The over-ambitious organisation of the Knights
was too weak to stand up against these difficulties, and they were of
diminishing influence after a rapid decline from the zenith of their power.
As the Knights withered away the American Federation of Labor,
founded in 1885 under its first and perennial President, Samuel Gompers,
came to the fore. Here was a masterful personality prepared to devote his
life to the cause of labour, but only on the terms which he himself dictated.
Unionisation should aim at the skilled, not the unskilled; the effort to
improve wages and working conditions for this restricted group would be
unremitting, but it would work for immediate gains within the capitalist
system not for its overthrow; in politics the unions would reward friends
and punish enemies but would commit themselves to no party or political
creed, and association with intellectual radicals would be avoided. Skilled
labour would win middle-class status and accept the conventions of a
middle-class world, and the successful labour leader would establish him-
self as a useful member of the community who could offer industrial
discipline in return for employer concessions. The labour history of the
late nineteenth century was far from untroubled: there was a shocking
incident at the Homestead Steel works when first a private army of
Pinkerton detectives and then the state militia of Pennsylvania were used
against strikers who had occupied the factory, and in 1894 Federal troops
were used in force against railways strikers in the Chicago area. It was
also at this period that judges sympathetic to employers began to make
extensive use of injunctions ordering strikers to cease and desist from
actions which threatened property, and to punish breaches of this injunc-
tion as contempt of court without jury trial. These events drove a small
minority of labour leaders to socialism, but they also demonstrated the
wisdom of the cautious policy of Gompers, which was deliberately
framed to avoid clashes between labour and the organised forces of law
and order. Even more conservative were the Railway Brotherhoods
drawing upon the skilled cream of the labour force. By 1 904 the American
Federation of Labor claimed over three-quarters of the 2,000,000 union
members, and though engaged in perpetual propaganda warfare with the
recently founded National Association of Manufacturers it had become
even more dogmatically anti-socialist.
With all their harshness and crudity the raw centres of industrial civilisa-
tion seemed vigorous and hopeful, but the same could hardly be said of
the greater cities, which seemed to add to the vices of the old world some
which were peculiarly American. In 1890 a Danish-American journalist,
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Jacob Riis, published a revealing book on New York’s densely populated
tenement districts entitled How the Other Half Lives. It attracted wide-
spread attention and challenged the easy assumption of religious and
evolutionary thought that bad social conditions were the consequence of
depravity, not its cause. To nineteenth-century reformers the more apparent
evil of urban society was government by bosses and rings, clearly one of
the worst political abuses in the world, which seemed to be impregnably
based upon the mass vote of the very poor. In cities almost entirely devoid
of public social services, and in a country with a traditional distrust of
those who were huddled together in towns, the slum dweller received from
the boss and his henchmen small charities, protection, jobs, and above all
human contact with the bewildering world of power and consequence.
Unacknowledged by the good citizens the boss performed an important
service for them in preventing the spread of revolutionary ideas in this soil
of discontent, but there could be little doubt that the need for his existence
pointed to a major failure in American civilisation. The slums and the evils
of city government blinded most intelligent Americans to the obvious fact
that the city rather than the countryside was the standard-bearer of the
new American civilisation, that they were centres of culture and higher
education as well as of social evil, and that, especially in the Mid-west, it
was the city which provided the outlet and opportunity for depressed or
redundant rural population. To one group of Americans this was obvious,
and the period saw the beginning of the great migration of Negroes from
the South to northern cities.
The problem of the city merged into that of the foreign-born. These
continued to arrive in formidable numbers; there was a marked shift away
from those to whom English was a native language; the vast majority of
them went to the great cities. But their assimilation had long been a
matter of pride to patriotic Americans and in general American society
maintained its attitude of welcome. Wherever the American educational
system could reach the immigrant it performed a remarkable work of
indoctrination, which was facilitated by the immigrant’s acceptance of
Americanisation as necessary for the success of his children. In most areas
which received immigrants the tradition if not the consistent application
of free elementary education was established, and most of them enacted
compulsory attendance laws. A great deal of local pride and communal
effort went into the elementary school system, and during this period the
free high-school was also striking roots in many areas. Though educational
progress was a spontaneous achievement and followed the course set by
earlier trends, its aims and methods were influenced by the need to educate
new Americans in American citizenship, and a study of school curricula
would form a useful indication of the picture which Americans wished to
present to themselves and to the world. Lacking the mystical trappings of
ancient monarchy, with a short history devoted to the attainment of
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middle-class ideals rather than to military glory or genteel chivalry, and
with the raw memory of the Civil War in the immediate past, the American
of the late nineteenth century might have a difficult task when he sought to
celebrate or explain his national existence. Yet by 1900 no people were
more conscious of national identity or more self-conscious about its
merits; American patriotism transcended diverse racial origins and
flourished under a government which seemed to offer no focal-point for
loyalty.
The war with Spain in 1 898 is sometimes represented as the opening
of a new era in American nationality; at one bound it seemed to heal
sectional discord and turn the Americans from an introvert into an extro-
vert people. Yet national feeling was latent and released by the war, not
created by it. It was not fought because the leaders of the developed
capitalist society wished to fight it, and it was bitterly opposed by many
keepers of the Northern conscience ; but it aroused the enthusiasm of those
who had been least associated with American progress: Southerners,
westerners and ordinary newspaper readers whose passions were stirred
by patriotic journalism. Nationalism which had seemed lost in the morass
of sectional discord had retained its powerful appeal and, once its latent
forces were released, the self-confidence which had characterised the North
and Mid-west swept across the country.
First among the factors which aided the regeneration of American
nationalism in the late nineteenth century was material achievement.
Despite the recurrent crises it was apparent that most Americans were
better off than ever before and that the country was leaping ahead of her
industrial rivals. For the ordinary American material progress was not
merely a matter of wealth and production, but a romantic concept which
transformed the ugliness of the late nineteenth-century civilisation into a
symbol of man’s triumph over both nature and the ancient bonds of
aristocracy and monarchy. Nothing struck the imagination more forcibly
than the conquest of the continent; vast wheat fields covered land which
earlier geographers had marked as the dead heart of the continent, five
great railway routes spanned the west, and on the shores of the Pacific a
thriving new American society had come into being. Fraudulent railway
promotion, Homestead Act failures, armed warfare between settlers and
cattle barons, wars of extermination and savagery against Indians, and the
lawlessness and materialism of western society were all transformed into
an epic of achievement which came to count for more than the reality.
Could not the vigour of western expansion and the breakdown of old
social restraints be productive of much good? The civilisation of the Mid-
west seemed to supply an affirmative answer for here was a region which
owed little to the traditions of the Old World, which was a purely American
creation, and in which great differences in wealth were reconciled with
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social mobility, neighbourliness seemed compatible with the acquisitive
instinct, men of different races were blending to produce a new type of
man, and democratic politics were freely and vigorously conducted. Even
eastern academics could become excited by this western achievement, and
there was a ready response when F. J. Turner, a young Mid-western
historian, enunciated his ‘frontier thesis’ in 1893. For Turner American
civilisation was distinct and not a mere imitation of Europe; it owed its
distinctiveness to a unique historical experience, and it was the moving
frontier which had moulded the American character. Turner’s theory
might be given a pessimistic twist, for it was occasioned by the ‘closing’
of the frontier discovered by the census of 1890 with the implication that
this expansive and creative phase in American history was now past, but
for most people the impact of the theory lay in its explanation of national
character. Nor need one forget the Old World if one remembered the
changes wrought by the American climate, and in the same year 1893
another young academic, destined to wield an even greater influence
than Turner, Woodrow Wilson, wrote that ‘ every element of the old life
that penetrated the continent at all has been digested and has become an
element of new life. It is this transformation that constitutes our history.’
Though the idea of nationality fed upon economic success and western
expansion, Americans inevitably found the most telling symbols of the
national existence in politics. Turner saw American democracy as the
culminating effect of American experience ‘rising stark and strong and
full of life from the American forest’. The American tradition had
emerged as a political tradition and it was to a body of political doctrine
that allegiance was given; particular interest therefore attaches to those
forces which sustained ideas and institutions formulated in the rural world
of the eighteenth century. The practice of politics did less than might have
been imagined to damage these beliefs, for with all its faults the political
system was resilient, retained its capacity to absorb discontents, and pro-
vided the formulae by which diverse interests could be harmonised. The
acceptance by the South of its new and subordinate position in the nation
can be largely explained by the major role which it played in one of the
main parties. The grievances voiced by agrarian radicals were offset by
the share which agrarian representatives obtained in the parties and in
the national government. The great Populist upheaval passed away with-
out effecting a permanent disruption of the nation because it was first
absorbed by a major party and then defeated in a normal electoral battle.
At the same time the localism of politics left a field of action for those who
failed to impress their views upon the nation. Though grievances might be
exploited at election time, the whole tendency of party politics was to blunt
the edge of discontent and to harmonise divergent groups. The less com-
mendable aspects of politics worked in the same direction. The services of
the city bosses in immunising the city masses against revolutionary infec-
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tion have already been noticed. At a higher level the developing use of
pressure groups held out to special interests the hope of obtaining what
they wanted, led them to work with politicians rather than against them,
and ensured that those with power and the ability to organise would not
become alienated from representative government. In the same way the
nature of politics had much to do with the reconciliation of organised
labour to life in a capitalist world. Thus politics reflected and emphasised
the characteristics of a society in which there were still great opportunities,
in which class prejudice or accent did little to embarrass the man who made
himself, and in which social and geographic mobility allowed a very large
number of men to get what they wanted out of life.
The course of events revealed the strength of a political tradition based
upon revolutionary principles, yet incorporating the checks and balances
dear to conservative minds. The discontented could appeal to the tradition
without being branded as heretics, the dominant groups could appropriate
from it so much as coincided with their economic and social needs. When
the divisive character of politics in other countries is remembered, the
function of the maligned American political system assumes a greater
significance and helps to explain the social stability which the United
States had achieved by 1900. It was within this established framework,
and using familiar slogans and remedies, that the ferment of progres-
sivism was beginning to move at the end of the century; its three great
incentives — anti-trust, anti-boss, and anti-slum — were variants on ac-
cepted themes, and reforming intellectuals did not develop that profound
sense of alienation which influenced so many of their European counter-
parts.
The reconciliation of a conservative social order with a still-radical
political creed necessarily caused doubts and divisions amongst the leaders
of American thought, and there was a perceptible shift away from the old
assumptions. The radical Republican concept of national power riding
upon equal rights lost its hold, and the failure of Reconstruction demo-
cracy and the evils of city government spread disillusionment amongst the
educated upper classes. A few intellectuals moved from the advocacy of
impartial suffrage which would disenfranchise the ignorant of all races to
a profound distrust of democracy. Henry Adams in his novel Democracy
and in his Education of Henry Adams expressed this alienation from the
popular creed in marked form. Anti-democratic feeling was seen in a
less overt way in the legal profession and especially in the higher courts
where the protection of property against democratically elected majorities
became a major theme. Public men gave public praise to democracy,
whatever their private reservations, but if white democracy had to be
endorsed black democracy was abandoned. By the end of the century an
influential minority stressed the importance of race, and of leaders within
the race. Captain Alfred Mahan believed in the mission of the Anglo-
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Saxons and argued for the naval power with which it could be fulfilled.
Rudyard Kipling abjured the Americans to take up the white-man’s
burden, and the young Theodore Roosevelt was infected with a mystical
notion of racial destiny. The changing mood was reflected in changing
emphasis upon the traditions and symbols of American history. Nation-
budding replaced revolution as the great theme of early American history ;
the star of Jefferson waned slightly despite the conventional loyalty of the
Democratic party, and the star of Hamilton shone forth more brightly;
above all the Founding Fathers, a convenient description which could em-
brace men of varying beliefs, came to occupy first place in the American
pantheon, while the Declaration of Independence, manifesto of a revolu-
tion, yielded its place at the centre of the American stage to the Consti-
tution, symbol of ordered and balanced government.
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CHAPTER XIX
THE STATES OF LATIN AMERICA
at the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century two
ZA generations had passed since the continental American colonies of
1 \ Spain and Portugal had won their independence. During these
years these new states had maintained their independence, expanded their
commercial and cultural relations with Europe and progressed toward
political stability. The half-dozen larger Spanish American units, roughly
coincident with the colonial viceroyalties and captaincies-general which
had emerged from the struggle against the mother-country, had split into
sixteen separate republics, and within each of these national feeling had
grown and increasingly justified a political map which at the outset had
not set off really separate peoples from each other. Portuguese America,
in contrast, had successfully weathered centrifugal tendencies, and in 1870
the empire of Brazil was the largest, the most powerful, and the most
stable state in Latin America. In the West Indies, the political pattern
remained colonial: Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish con-
trol; the lesser Antilles were subject to their various European metro-
polises; and isolated Haiti and the precariously sovereign Dominican
Republic alone represented the republican principle in the Caribbean.
After 1870 the chief source of changes in this area was the unprecedented
development of its connections with the outside world. Expanding
industry in Europe and in the United States required ever larger amounts
of raw materials such as hides, cotton, and wool ; the new chemical and
electrical industries required more and more rubber, copper, zinc, lead,
and other metals. New concentrations of urban population also needed
increasing amounts of imported food: sugar, wheat, meat, coffee, and
cacao. At the same time capital funds and engineering skill became avail-
able in the economically advanced countries for the purpose of expanding
production to meet these new demands. Of equal significance is the
greatly increased flow of immigration from southern Europe — Portugal,
Spain, and Italy — to the countries in the temperate portions of South
America.
European investors had been quick to see possibilities of profit in Latin
America immediately following the achievement of independence there,
but the loans floated in London by the new governments had practically
all gone into default. The high hopes of those who invested in mining
enterprises in Chile and Mexico in the 1820’s were also dashed. Since
then, there had been a slow movement of funds into the area, but after
1870 there was a rapid change in the situation. Overall figures are not
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available, but it has been calculated that by 1 880 Latin American securities
with a par value of £179,490,261 had been floated in London. About
£70,000,000 represented Latin American government bonds in default,
but £56,412,255 consisted of direct investments in business enterprises in
Latin America. By 1900 these sums had vastly increased, though most of
the new funds were invested before the economic depression of the 1 890’s.
At the end of the century total par value of Latin American securities
traded on the London Stock Exchange was £540 million and more than
half of this sum represented direct investments rather than Latin American
government bonds. Of course many investments were made that were not
listed on the London exchange. By 1897 the United States investments in
Latin America, chiefly consisting of mines and railroads in Mexico and
sugar interests in Cuba, totalled $300 milli on. There were also French,
German, and other European investments of considerable importance,
though the British share in the total was the greatest. In 1913, after a
decade of rapid investment expansion, British investments were still more
than double those of the United States and four times the value of French
and German investments. It is almost certain that British pre-eminence
in this field of activity was even greater in 1900.
Of the direct investments in Latin America, a very large part of the
British share consisted of railroads, about 70 per cent in 1890. Mining
enterprises, public utilities, and the Chilean nitrate industry accounted for
most of the rest of the British direct investments.
The transforming effect of this flow of capital, by far the greater part of
which went to Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba,
can hardly be overestimated. It brought about modernisation of public
services: gas, electricity, water, and public transportation by street rail-
ways in the major Latin American cities. It made possible railroads that
connected mines and agricultural hin terlands with seaports, capital cities
with interior provinces and with ports. In addition, machines, steam-
engines, generators, and motors brought about changes in the labour
force because of their requirements of new mechanical skills. This created
the beginnings of an industrial proletariat in countries that had previously
been inhabited almost exclusively by peasants and landholders — the peon
and the patron.
The influence of European immigration was much more selective than
that of foreign investment. Though colonies of European business and
professional men, managers and technicians appeared in all the larger
urban centres in Latin America, the numbers involved were negligible as
far as any influence on the ethnic pattern of population was concerned,
except in three countries. Almost all the European immigrants to Latin
America in this period went to Argentina and Brazil. Overall figures
compound many errors and do not take into account the reverse current
of emigration which was at times very considerable. However, more than
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four million Europeans migrated to Latin America during the three
decades from 1870 to 1900. There was a steady increase in the current
during these years. From 1870 to 1879 less than half a million immigrants
arrived; in the next decade, almost a million and a half ; from 1890 to 1899
over two million.
Apart from the massive movement to Argentina and Brazil which
accounted for most of these immigrants, Uruguay was also involved. As
early as i860 over 20 per cent of its population was of European birth.
In 1900, there were close to 150,000 European-born living in the country.
Chile received a smaller number of immigrants. The fact that a consider-
able number of these were concentrated on the southern frontier and that
many of these were German or Swiss made them somewhat more con-
spicuous than if they had been more widely distributed, but the total
number, including both colonists brought by the government and free
immigrants, was less than 100,000 from the beginnings of colonisation to
the end of the century.
The largest group of immigrants was the Italian, followed at some dis-
tance by the Spaniards and Portuguese (mainly to Brazil), and then there
came a great variety of much smaller groups: German, French, British,
Jewish, and a few Slavs. In the areas in which they settled they over-
whelmed the native creole population. Brazil from Sao Paulo to the
South became predominantly European, as did Montevideo and its
environs in Uruguay, and most of Argentina, except for the far north and
western provinces.
Closely related to the investment of capital and the migration of people
were the improvements in transportation and communication between
Europe and Latin America and between the United States and the
northern Caribbean part of the area. Submarine cables were laid between
1865 and 1890, connecting first Mexico and Central America and eventu-
ally the whole of South America via the Pacific coast with the United
States. Other lines connected the east coast of South America with
Europe. Even more conspicuous was the improvement in maritime trans-
portation brought about by the general introduction of steel steamships,
both for passenger and freight service. The area served best was the east
coast of South America,' where the greatest volume of traffic existed. All
the maritime nations of Europe competed in this area. There were British,
French, German, Spanish, and Italian passenger lines serving Brazilian
and Rio de la Plata ports, to say nothing of freighters of a still wider
variety of nationality.
In the Caribbean, American lines served Central America, Mexico, and
the West Indian islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. On the Pacific coast
British services were the most important for South America but the
American Pacific Mail Company connected the west coast of Central
America and Panama with United States Pacific ports. The lack of any
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direct passenger service from the United States to Brazil and Argentina
is clear indication of the relative unimportance of commercial relations
between the United States and this part of Latin America in the latter
nineteenth century.
Complementary to shipping and telegraphic communication as an
adjunct to trade was the service provided by banks. The first corporate
banking institutions devoted to the financing of foreign trade were the
British institutions in Argentina : the London and River Plate Bank and
the British Bank of South America, both founded before 1870. The
London and Brazilian Bank dates from the same period (1862). Between
then and the end of the century banks were founded by Italian, French,
and German interests to finance trade between those countries and
Buenos Aires. In time branches were established in Uruguay, Chile, and
elsewhere.
To get a clearer picture of economic changes in this period it is neces-
sary to review the developments in various countries, for there was much
variety in the experience of the different nations.
It was in Argentina that economic growth was most marked. This
country, one of the least developed and most underpopulated parts of the
Spanish empire at the beginning of the century, outdid all other Latin
American states in rapidity of population growth, volume of immigration,
mileage of railroads constructed and in expansion of foreign trade during
the last three decades of the century. Immigration had begun shortly after
the fall of Rosas in 1852, but it remained small until after i860. Between
1870 and 1900 over 2,200,000 immigrants entered the country. Some of
these settled in agricultural colonies in the provinces of Santa Fe, Entre
Rios and Buenos Aires; many others became tenants on lands of Argen-
tine estancieros, now increasingly devoted to agriculture; others remained
in the growing cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Bahia Blanca. The
greatest single group was that of the Italians. Next, at some distance,
came the Spaniards. These two nationalities comprised the great majority
of all immigrants admitted. Partly because of this flow of new blood, but
also because of rapid increase of the creole population, the census of 1897
showed more than double the number of inhabitants in 1869. The city of
Buenos Aires grew at an even more rapid rate. Railway construction had
begun in the 1850’s, but in 1870 there were but 458 miles of track in
operation. These had grown by 1880 to over fifteen hundred miles and by
1900 to ten thousand miles. The Argentine rail network surpassed that of
all other Latin American countries. Between 1880 and 1900 the nominal
value of British investments alone rose from £20 million to over £200
million.
Railroads and immigrants together made possible for the first time the
large-scale production of wheat and other cereals for export. The area of
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cultivated land in the country increased from one million and a half acres
in 1870 to over 17 million acres in 1901. From being a net importer of
cereals, Argentina in thirty years reached a point at which 100 million
bushels of wheat and maize were exported in 1 899. Meanwhile, the export
of meat products was revolutionised by the advent of refrigeration. The
first refrigerated steamer took a cargo of frozen mutton to Europe in 1877.
In 1883 the first modem packing plant or frigorifico was built near
Buenos Aires. By the end of the century thousands of tons of frozen
mutton and beef were being shipped yearly to Europe. This development
brought with it a transformation of the traditional cattle industry which
had only produced hides, horns, tallow, and jerked beef for export. The
market for frozen meat encouraged the importation of pure-bred Durham
and Hereford bulls and the consequent upgrading of the native stock. To
take care of more valuable herds it became necessary to fence pastures, to
control insect pests and diseases of cattle, to grow artificial pasture of
alfalfa and other forage crops, to provide better water supply, and to use
more labour than had been customary. As a result of this economic
growth the value of Argentine foreign trade (the sum of exports and
imports) almost tripled between 1870 and 1900.
No other Latin American country could rival Argentina during these
years in rapidity of material progress. Each of the others lacked one or
more of the combination of favourable conditions which presented them-
selves in Argentina.
In Brazil, which had overshadowed Argentina in development, as
in area, before the 1870’s, development, though considerable, was now
less pronounced. Here again immigration was a major transforming
factor, though it brought change primarily to the south, from Sao Paulo
to Rio Grande. It had begun earlier than in Argentina but it remained
small until the eve of the abolition of slavery in the 1870's. When a wage
system of labour was introduced in the coffee industry and slave labour
disappeared the inflow of European immigrants became important. From
less than two hundred thousand in the 1870’s, immigrants increased to
over half a million in the decade of the 1880’s and to well over a million in
the 1890’s. Portuguese were most numerous until the end of the imperial
era in 1889 but were surpassed in number by Italians thereafter. The
great majority of the immigrants went to the rapidly growing state of
Sao Paulo. The production of coffee boomed in Sao Paulo, just as cereal
production did in Argentina, under the combined stimulus of immigra-
tion and railroad construction. Brazil, in terms of miles of track in
operation, was not far behind Argentina. Over 6000 miles were in use by
1889 and by 1904 the 10,000 mile point had been reached, but, of course,
these lines served less adequately a vastly larger country. Most of the
construction was in the state of Sao Paulo with trunk lines connecting it
with Rio Grande to the south and Rio de Janeiro and Minas to the north
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and east. Coffee exports rose from 400 million pounds, the average for
the years 1870-5, to 1 130 million pounds, the average for the last five years
in the century. Unlike Argentina, however, which could depend on a
variety of export staples, Brazil’s foreign trade depended heavily on coffee,
which was responsible for about two-thirds of the total value of exports.
It was double that of Argentina in 1870, and three times that of Chile,
Peru or Mexico, but thereafter it did not grow at the rate of Argentina’s.
For a while rubber seemed to be bringing about a desirable diversifica-
tion. Exports from the Amazon Valley rose from 10 million pounds in
1870 to 52 million pounds in 1900. However, this was a short-lived boom
soon to collapse. Cacao, meat products, lumber, and forest products were
only minor items among exports.
In one respect Brazil forged ahead of Argentina during the final decade
of the century. The cotton textile industry expanded until in 1905 over
100 mills employed about 40,000 workers and produced almost a quarter
of a million metres of cloth. There was a rush of investment in industry in
the years immediately following the fall of the empire and the establish-
ment of the republic in 1889. These establishments were, apart from
textiles, devoted to the production of hats, shoes, and clothing, and the
processing of various kinds of foodstuffs. An industrial complex in Sao
Paulo was stimulated by the capital gains of coffee-plantation owners, the
availability of labour, and the existence of water-power which at the end
of the century was harnessed in hydro-electric plants.
Despite these promising economic developments in Brazil, there can be
no doubt that the pace of progress was not so rapid as in Argentina.
Population growth was slower, the total moving between 1870 and 1900
from 10 to over 17 million inhabitants, but failing to double itself as in
Argentina. Again, if the British capital investment can be taken as an
indication of the rate of growth, Brazil lagged in this respect. In 1870
British investments in Brazil had been larger than those in Argentina.
In 1900 they were less than one-half the value of investments in the
River Plate republic.
In Chile we have another example of a country which made some
spectacular economic gains, but which was not as greatly changed as
Argentina. Immigration was not heavy. Investment of foreign capital
was also smaller than in either Argentina or Brazil. In 1900 the total sum,
more or less evenly divided between mining property (including nitrate
works), railroads, and government bonds, was not much more than one-
third the figure for Brazil. Railroad construction, though considerable in
relation to area, was far behind Argentina and Brazil in total mileage,
amounting in 1900 to about 3000 miles, equally divided between state-
owned and privately owned lines. Chilean agriculture, though it was
diversified and based on extensive irrigation, did not expand and popula-
tion growth was far slower than in either Argentina or Brazil. From about
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
two millions in 1870 the total number of inhabitants had only increased to
a little less than three millions in 1900.
Chile did experience extraordinary progress in these years in the nitrate
industry in the northern deserts acquired from Bolivia and Peru as a result
of the Chilean victory in the War of the Pacific. In 1 870 Chile had pro-
duced no nitrates; in 1880 a quarter of a million metric tons; in 1900
one million four hundred thousand metric tons, and approximately three-
quarters of the total world production. This had an enormously stimu-
lating effect on government revenues, public works and railroad construc-
tion, and the growth of industry. By 1900 Chile was manufacturing an
extraordinary variety of consumer goods: hats, shoes, cigarettes, flour,
lard, textiles, leather, furniture, cordage, paper, tin and earthenware,
cement, matches, soap, candles, fertilisers, and industrial chemicals.
There were also important machine and metal-product works which could
repair railroad and industrial machinery and make spare parts. Chilean
businessmen were already organising a national association of manu-
facturers and had achieved sufficient influence to induce the government
to adopt a frankly protective tariff.
It was only in mining, therefore, that Chile could be said to surpass
Argentina and Brazil in 1900, but if some of the statistical data are
presented in terms of per capita figures or figures per square mile the
result is much more favourable to Chile. In short, Chile was making
excellent progress but on the smaller scale natural to a country with a
much smaller area and population than its neighbours on the Atlantic
coast.
Uruguay must also be included among the countries making substantial
economic gains in this period, though in scale these were even smaller than
those of Chile. Only about a million people lived in this republic in 1900,
though growth had been steady from about 600,000 in 1870. The same
forces that led to the expansion and transformation of the Argentine live-
stock industry were at work in Uruguay, bringing about an extraordinary
growth in the number of sheep and cattle in the country. The former
increased from less than a million at mid-century to over 18 million in
1900; the latter in the same period moved up from less than two million
to almost seven. The export of dried beef was important and, in 1900,
there were twenty-one establishments engaged in producing charqui. In
Uruguay, too, were the pioneer factories for the production of meat
extract dating from the establishment of the original Liebig plant at Fray
Bentos in 1863. Uruguayan railroad progress was considerable in relation
to the size of the country. Over a thousand miles of track were in use by
1900 and 1 1 of a total of 36 million pounds invested in the country repre-
sented railroads. The foreign trade of the republic doubled in value between
1870 and 1900. It will be noted, however, that there was no important
growth of Uruguayan agriculture except in the livestock industry. Grow-
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ing prosperity was therefore somewhat more precarious than where it had
a broader base.
In 1870 Peru would have had to be included among the countries
showing significant economic growth. This had been due almost entirely
to the export of guano from the rocky coasts and offshore islands where
the excrement of countless birds for thousands of years had created
deposits of great value as fertiliser. Gover n ment revenue derived from
guano shipments made possible large expenditures for public works and
railroads; it also led to waste of money and the undue enrichment of
those private interests associated with the government in these varied
activities. What was worse, perhaps, was the expansion of the foreign
debt beyond all reason. To cope with the threat of bankruptcy the ad-
ministration of President Jose Balta created a monopoly of guano opera-
tions, eliminating for the future the many consignatarios who had served
as agents for the sale of guano in European and colonial markets. A con-
tract was made with a French banking firm, Dreyfus et Cie, according to
which it was granted the guano monopoly and in return agreed to pay the
interest on the foreign debt and advance funds to Peru in addition. This
might have permitted an orderly liquidation of the financial difficulties of
the republic, but the Balta administration began spending and borrowing,
recklessly mortgaging future guano shipments. The American promoter
and railroad builder Henry Meiggs was at this time engaged in his
spectacular construction programme. On the surface, then, Peru seemed
to be forging ahead rapidly, but this apparent progress was based rather
insecurely on guano. A fall in the price or in the demand for the product
would bring disaster.
When this era of speculative prosperity was followed by the defeat of
Peru in the War of the Pacific (1879-83), which was accompanied by
widespread looting and destruction of property in enemy-occupied areas,
the result was bankruptcy and stagnation. After 1890 there was a begin-
ning of recovery, but even in 1900 total Peruvian trade was smaller than in
1870. In thirty years the population had increased only from 3,200,000 to
4,000,000 inhabitants. There was no appreciable European immigration
and in its stead the earlier introduction of Chinese coolies before 1870 was
supplemented in the 1890’s by Japanese workers. The chief new elements
of strength in the Peruvian economy in 1900 were the expanding com-
mercial, large-scale agriculture of the irrigated coastal areas, which pro-
duced large quantities of sugar and cotton, and the revival of mining under
new, technically advanced foreign management, which was making Peru
an important producer of copper and other metals. Large sums had been
spent on railway construction, which was carried on in the teeth of enor-
mous engineering difficulties and at high cost, but the total mileage in
operation was considerably less than that of Chile. In Peru the influences
working toward economic progress were neutralised by contrary factors.
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Only two countries in northern Latin America can be said to have made
economic gains at all comparable to those of Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
These were Mexico and Cuba. In 1870 Mexico, with over nine million
inhabitants, was second only to Brazil in population among Latin
American countries, but its general economic progress was not com-
parable to its population. The only railroad in the country was that
linking Mexico and Veracruz. The foreign trade of Mexico was less
valuable than that of Peru or Chile and far behind that of Argentina. The
great majority of Mexicans were engaged in subsistence agriculture.
Even the large estates were primarily run to supply local markets. Mining,
which accounted for most of the value of exports, had expanded only
slowly in normal times and was affected adversely by the many civil wars.
After 1876, however, the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz adopted
policies favourable to the entry of foreign capital and this led to extensive
railroad building and the connection of the Mexican lines with those of
the United States. During the 1 88o’s, too, a new era of mining based on
modem technology and capable of using lower grade ores came into
existence. Though silver mining was still important, copper and other
metals previously neglected were now produced on a large scale. Coal
mining also became important in the 1890’s. Foreign capital also went
into the public-utilities field and on a smaller scale into manufacturing,
establishing jute and linen factories, soap and vegetable-oil works, a
cement plant, and other enterprises. The first beginnings of the Mexican
oil industry came in 1890 with the founding by United States’ interests of
the Mexican Petroleum Company. Measured in some ways, Mexican
economic progress was considerable. The credit of the government was
good. By 1900 the annual value of the foreign trade of the republic had
increased fourfold since 1870. On the other hand there was no real
advance in Mexican agriculture ; the mass of the peasantry were living in
an even more depressed state than in 1870 and the growth of population
was very small. Mexico and Brazil in 1870 had almost the same number
of inhabitants, but Brazil in 1900 had three and a half million more than
Mexico. Mexico has been estimated to have received by 1900 approxi-
mately £67 million of British capital in addition to over $200 million
from the United States. Foreign investment, therefore, was roughly
equivalent in Mexico and in Brazil, a clear indication that over-all eco-
nomic progress depended on many other factors.
Cuba may be included with the countries which made marked progress
during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, but this progress was
neutralised, as in the case of Peru, by war — in the case of Cuba there were
two successive wars of independence, 1868-78 and 1895-8. In both of
these conflicts there was very great damage to the sugar plantations which
were the chief base of Cuban wealth. In addition, the country was a
colony until 1898 and it is therefore difficult to compare with independent
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countries. However, it is clear that Cuba represented one of the areas of
economic progress. The population of the island grew with sugar pros-
perity and received immigrants both from Spain and from Jamaica and
other West Indian islands suffering from under-employment. Over $50
million of United States capital was invested in Cuban sugar. British
capital invested included about £10 million in railroads and manufac-
turing. In 1900 the country had not yet recovered from the terrible losses
incurred during the struggle for independence. In spite of that fact,
Cuba’s trade at that time was of greater value than that of nine other
Latin American countries. As a major source of sugar Cuba was im-
portant to the rest of the world.
The countries which have not so far been mentioned are those located
in the American tropics from Guatemala to Paraguay. It cannot be said
that these countries were completely stagnant economically, but their
progress was relatively slight. In all of them economic growth was
chiefly due to the expansion of production of one or two export crops or
minerals for which the markets of the world exhibited an uncertain
demand. This made difficult any steady progress. Coffee production
began to expand notably in the last years of the century in Colombia and
in several Central American countries. Cacao prospered in Venezuela and
Ecuador as well as in Brazil. Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela all
shared to some extent in the rubber boom which was on the march in 1900
in Amazonia. Toward the close of the 1890’s Bolivian mineral production
increased, replacing in importance the nitrates lost to Chile in the War of
the Pacific. The production of tin, later to be so important in Bolivia,
began at this time. Paraguay also saw some recovery as the century
waned. The value of its foreign trade doubled between 1880 and 1900, but
the total value remained small in comparison to nearby Uruguay.
It is an indication of the regional contrasts which had developed in
Latin American economic life that the value of the foreign trade of
Venezuela and Colombia combined was less than that of Uruguay. There
were more miles of railroad in operation in Chile than in ten of the
tropical republics.
Changes in political life in Latin America showed a tendency to corre-
late with the different rates of economic progress. In the period between
the achievement of independence and 1870 certain characteristic forms of
political behaviour had appeared in Latin America, manifesting them-
selves to a greater or a lesser degree in the various countries. Among these
were: political instability evidenced by failure to create a workable consti-
tutional order, by frequent civil wars and coups d'etat ; the primacy of
personal loyalty to charismatic leaders over ideology, and the consequent
prevalence of regimes of force based on the prestige of caudillos; political
conflicts taking the form of clashes between liberals, who were above all
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anti-clerical, but also were upholders in theory of democracy and of local
autonomy or federalism, and conservatives who upheld the concept of a
hierarchical aristocratic political and social order and a close collaboration
of the state with the Roman Church. All these tendencies continued after
1870, but in some countries they came to be modified in important parti-
culars. In certain countries political stability increased greatly. It was
based on the growing strength of ‘ enlightened ’ oligarchies who governed
either through political machines operating under a constitutional system
or through co-operation with an ‘enlightened’ dictator. Parallel to this
greater stability came a great expansion of the bureaucracies and a profes-
sionalising of the military service. At the end of the era it is also possible to
see the dawn of a protest against the selfish rule of the few over the many.
As in the case of economic change, one of the countries which best
exemplified the growth of political stability was Argentina. By 1870 the
sporadic revolts of caudillos of the interior had all been put down, but the
country was still disturbed by conflict within the city and province of
Buenos Aires between those who favoured and those who opposed the
‘federalisation’ of the city. This question led to fighting in 1874 and again
in 1880, but on the latter occasion the matter was definitively settled by
the creation of a federal district and the separation of the city from the
province of Buenos Aires. The national point of view had triumphed, and
though the form of the Argentine constitution was federal the power of
the federal government grew rapidly at the expense of the provinces. The
old unitary and federal parties which had dominated Argentine politics
since 1820 disappeared. A conservative, business-minded oligarchy
governed the country. The government was carried on, superficially at
least, according to the constitution and elections were held regularly.
Electoral laws, however, made possible the control of elections by the
ruling conservatives as there was no provision for a secret ballot.
In Chile political evolution took a somewhat different form. Constitu-
tional stability had been the achievement of an earlier age, beginning in
1830. The years from 1870 to 1890 were marked by the progressive
weakening of the executive power, which had previously been almost all-
powerful and able, through the ministry of the interior and the police, to
control the results of congressional elections. In a process of transition
from the earlier strong presidential regimes towards a system in which
political parties or factions in the congress played a greater part, the
executive came to be more and more the creature of shifting coalitions
between the factions of the major conservative and liberal parties in which
the nationalists (a smaller intermediate group) and the left-wing radicals
played a lesser role. Though the Constitution of 1833 did not prescribe it,
it became customary for presidents to govern through ministries which
enjoyed the support of congressional majorities. This trend had gone so
far that when it was challenged by a headstrong chief executive, Jose
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Manuel Balmaceda, in 1891, a revolution broke out which succeeded after
severe fighting in deposing the president. The failure and subsequent
suicide of Balmaceda firmly established the parliamentary system in Chile
until the constitutional changes of the third decade of the following
century. On the other hand, although the conservative party was no
longer dominant and although the liberal party, which represented
primarily a tendency to limit the power of the Church, was increasingly
powerful, both parties supported the interests of the landed aristocracy.
Congress, dominating the executive, but ruling according to all the forms
of constitutional law and government, was the stronghold of an oligarchy.
In Brazil, the only monarchy in the New World, the major development
of the late nineteenth century was the downfall of the empire and the
establishment of the United States of Brazil. In spite of the personal
popularity of Dom Pedro II republicanism began to make gains after
1870. It was in harmony with the positivist philosophy which became
dominant in intellectual circles and with the movement for the abolition
of slavery which was stirring the country. At the same time, the enthusi-
asm of the slave-holding aristocracy for the imperial system was weakened
by the emperor’s acceptance of a policy of gradual emancipation. The
clergy, meanwhile, had been alienated from the monarch by the inter-
position of the emperor on regalist grounds to prevent the ecclesiastical
castigation of freemasons. The economic balance of power was shifting,
also, from the old plantation areas of the north-east to the new coffee-
producing areas in Sao Paulo and to other provinces farther south, to
which the bulk of the European immigrants were going and whose busi-
ness leaders sympathised less with tradition than those of Pernambuco
and Bahia. New forces increased the power of the liberals who cam-
paigned against a system in which, while a national assembly decorously
debated public issues and provided an appearance of parliamentary
government on the English model, as liberal and conservative ministries
succeeded each other in orderly manner, the emperor jealously guarded
his prerogative, and the lives of ministries depended on his will rather than
on the parliamentary majorities which were regularly manufactured to
support the ministers he called to power.
The crisis began in 1888 when, after years of violent agitation, the
government yielded to demands for immediate emancipation of all re-
maining slaves. The legislation providing for abolition made no provision
for compensation of slave-holders for their losses and antagonised con-
servatives who might otherwise have supported the empire, but who
remained aloof when a military revolt in 1 889 proclaimed a republic. The
revolutionists were able to take possession of the government with practi-
cally no bloodshed. The whole country accepted the new regime and Dom
Pedro and his family were sent into exile in Europe.
The disaffection of the armed forces was in part the result of positivist
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indoctrination in the military academy, in part due to the civilian bias
which Dom Pedro had exhibited. It was also caused by the political
ambitions of higher officers. For some years after the declaration of the
republic military and naval men held the highest offices in the new
government. In 1893 there was fighting between military and naval
forces for supremacy. However, the form of the new republican constitu-
tion was federal and provided great freedom for the growing business
interests of the country. As these interests came increasingly to control the
governments of the most powerful states, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais,
they were able finally to dominate from behind the fagade of military
leadership. After Deodoro da Fonseca, the first president, and his suc-
cessor, Floriano Peixoto, succeeding chief executives were civilians.
The achievement of constitutional order in Argentina after 1880, the
implanting of parliamentary government in Chile, the adoption of
republican institutions by Brazil, though they seemed to be disparate
developments, brought into power governments which gave free rein to
oligarchical interests. At the same time these countries were acting in
harmony with the vogue throughout the western world of constitution-
alism, republicanism, and representative government. In other Latin
American countries governments responsive to the interests of the land-
owning and business classes took a somewhat different form : the ‘ dicta-
torship of order and progress ’. These dictatorships differed from earlier
personal regimes in that they were all professedly liberal and anti-clerical.
Their liberalism, however, was much modified by their acceptance of the
positivist political philosophy. Even if the ultimate goal was to be liberal
democracy, the positivist emphasised the necessity for gradual progress
through work and education. He had no faith in revolution or in the
preaching of liberal principles as means to secure democracy or progress.
In practice these regimes frequently used the same repressive and cruel
methods to keep themselves in power and to eliminate opposition that had
been made familiar by earlier dictatorships with fewer ideological pre-
tensions. They governed with the support of part of the landholding
aristocracies and enjoyed, in addition, the favour of commercial and
industrial interests and frequently that of foreign capitalists.
In Mexico the Diaz regime evolved from the liberal republic restored by
Benito Juarez after the collapse of Maximilian’s empire. Diaz, one of the
principal heroes of the war against the French, having failed to achieve
the presidency via the ballot box, succeeded in his second attempt via the
pronunciamiento in 1876. He retained his liberal label throughout his
long career, but it was not long before he had established a highly
authoritarian political order. The army, the landholders, foreign investors,
businessmen, ambitious young politicos, even the Church, were all given
things they badly wanted in order to keep them friendly. Anyone who
opposed the regime found himself facing extremely disagreeable situations.
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The army had faith in Diaz (one of their own) and generals were
extensively employed in lucrative political and administrative positions.
Landowners were given carte blanche in dealing with discontented debt-
ridden peons; found the way made easy for them to purchase public lands
at low prices; appreciated the efficiency of Diaz’ rurales in maintaining
order in the countryside. Foreign capitalists admired Diaz’ re-establish-
ment of Mexican government credit and gladly lent him money. Those
who wished to invest in railways, mines, or haciendas found the govern-
ment co-operative. Diaz, in spite of his anti-clerical traditions, gradually
relaxed the enforcement of laws disagreeable to the Church, though they
remained on the statute books. It is not surprising therefore that the
hierarchy found that it could live with the dictator. Diaz gathered around
himself a group of young, able, and ambitious men, imbued with the
positivist ideas of the times, the so-called cientificos. Education lagged,
agriculture remained static, but in other respects Mexico showed eco-
nomic progress unknown at any time since independence.
Antonio Guzman Blanco’s two decades of power in Venezuela from
1870 to 1888 were in many ways parallel to the Diaz regime in Mexico.
Like Diaz he had a liberal tradition behind him, even though it was that
of the successful revolt of liberal caudillos against the old aristocracy
and the conservative party which had been its political expression;
and even more than Diaz he continued while in power to retain certain
shibboleths of liberalism. He patronised the Masonic Order, achieved
separation of Church and state, established civil marriage and secular
primary education, and suppressed religious orders. At the same time he
was a patron of economic progress, borrowing money in Europe for
elaborate and decorative public works and for the building of railroads.
His policy produced stability of a sort. Behind the fagade of liberalism,
however, it is easy to recognise the tyrant who denied his people political
freedom, persecuted his political rivals and made constitutions and elec-
tions a farce.
There were a number of similar regimes in Latin America in the final
years of the century. Justo Rufino Barrios, who ruled in Guatemala from
1871 to 1885, also exemplifies the liberal revolutionary who, in office,
becomes the benevolent despot. He followed an economic policy favour-
able to business, landholders, and to foreign capital. He initiated a pro-
gramme of aid to agriculture and commerce, railroad building, and other
public works. Unfortunately, less was accomplished along these lines
than might have been expected, owing primarily to Barrios’ preoccupation
with the idea of reconstituting the political union of Central America. It
would be possible to include other rulers in this group, but none of them
held power long enough to create a regime that can really be identified as
a dictatorship of ‘order and progress’.
Except where the new developments of the type described above
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occurred Latin American politics continued to follow the pattern estab-
lished earlier. Paraguay, especially, had suffered so extraordinarily in the
course of its valiant last-ditch defence of its territory against over-
whelming odds that it was not able to recover for decades. In 1870 it was
still occupied by foreign troops and final settlement of the peace terms was
in the future. The casualties of war, hunger, and disease had reduced the
population of the country from approximately one million prior to the
outbreak of war to less than half that number. Almost all men capable of
bearing arms were killed or disabled during the conflict. From 1870
onward Paraguay, no longer able to play a major or an independent role
in the politics of the Rio de la Plata region, tended increasingly to become
a satellite of rapidly growing Argentina, through whose territory alone
communication between the rest of the world and Paraguay was possible.
In Uruguay, the forced ally of Argentina and Brazil in the war against
Paraguay, the war did lead to a reaction against the domination of politics
by military chieftains. In 1870 a movement was inaugurated by young
civilians of both traditional parties to bring about a new political align-
ment based on principles. The movement was short-lived, however. The
attachment of Uruguayans to their traditional parties and to men on
horseback proved too powerful to overcome. The Colorado party which
had been placed in power through the successful revolution headed by
Venancio Flores remained in power, supposedly. In actuality power was
exercised by a series of generals, mainly in the interest of themselves and
their associates. It would not be worth while to chronicle the succession
of wars, revolutions and dictatorships which succeeded each other in
Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Central America and the Dominican
Republic and Haiti.
Any discussion of Latin American politics in this era, however, cannot
be closed without mention of the beginnings of protests against oli-
garchical rule and dictatorship. These movements of protest grew out of
democratic idealism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the labour move-
ment. None of these could point to important achievements before the
turn of the century, but their beginnings must be noted for they all became
significant shortly after 1900.
Liberal democratic idealism achieved the most conspicuous growth in
Argentina. The mismanagement and corruption of the administration of
President Miguel Juarez Celman led to the formation of a protest group,
the Union Civica, headed by the idealistic Leandro Alem, with whom
many men later to play major roles in Argentine politics were associated;
Hipolito Irigoyen, Marcelo Alvear, Lisandro de la Torre and others. An
uprising in 1890 organised by the Union Civica failed, but succeeded in so
weakening the position of the president that he resigned. Some leaders of
the Union Civica accepted a compromise political settlement, but Alem
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and Irigoyen held out against this and founded the Union Civica Radical,
later to be known as the Radical party. The Radicales campaigned against
the regular use of fraud and violence in elections. Electoral reform, they
believed, was the key to the solution of all problems. They revolted again
in 1893 and, though again put down, increasingly won the support of
public opinion. Early in the following period they were to become the
dominant political party in Argentina.
Except in Argentina liberal democratic ideas did not lead to organised
political activity, unless the left wing of the Chilean Radical party might
be considered to hold such views. Nevertheless, many individual figures
of importance spoke out against prevailing abuses. In Mexico Ignacio
Altamirano, the celebrated poet, spoke out against the official positivist
doctrine which denied the rights of man. In Cuba and in exile Jose Marti
was forging with his pen the democratic doctrine that was to become the
ideology of the future Cuban republic. In Peru Manuel Gonzalez Prada,
a great patriot and liberal, called upon all his countrymen to work for the
national welfare with honesty and with discipline. In Uruguay, Jose Batlle
y Ordonez from the columns of his newspaper and in his speeches in the
national congress called for policies that would transcend the traditional
party politics of his country. These men are only a few of many individuals
who in journalism and politics stood out in many countries for liberalism
and democracy. It could hardly be said, however, that they had by 1900
achieved many important results.
Equally scattered and even more lacking in concrete results were the
early beginnings of left-wing radicalism in Latin America. In the i89o’s
anarcho-syndicalist agitation and the organisation of labour unions under
the auspices of leaders of this persuasion began in several countries. In
Mexico the chief propagandist of this viewpoint was Ricardo Flores
Magon whose activities, with those of his brother Enrique and others,
date from 1892. In 1891 a syndicalist federation of labour unions came
into existence in Buenos Aires. Pedro Abad de Santillan was the chief
exponent of this ideology in Argentina. At the very end of the century,
after 1897, syndicalist unions and periodicals appeared in the nitrate fields
of northern Chile. It was natural that anarcho-syndicalism should have
been one of the first forms taken by proletarian discontent in Latin
America in view of the importance of anarchist doctrines in Spain.
Socialism, the chief rival of syndicalism hardly got a foothold anywhere in
Latin America before 1900 except in Argentina. The Argentine Socialist
party was founded by Juan B. Justo and Alfredo Palacios in 1896. This
party was not a doctrinaire Marxist party. It was a reformist organisation
favouring political action through legislation, somewhat along the lines of
the English Fabian Society.
Apart from the above-mentioned types of radical thought and organisa-
tion in the interest of the working class there were scattered examples of
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more limited and moderate labour organisation. In Mexico a union of
railway workers was organised as far back as 1890. In Argentina the
earliest instance seems to have been that of leather workers in 1 874. Most
unions, however, were affiliated with either socialist or anarchist organisa-
tions. In Buenos Aires there were federations after 1891 of both syndi-
calist and socialist unions. Those of Cuba and of Chile before 1900 were
chiefly under syndicalist influence. The labour movement and working-
class agitation were delayed in Latin America long after they achieved
importance in Europe and in the United States. Their first beginnings,
naturally enough, were in those countries which had been most fully
affected by capitalistic progress: Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico.
Brazil, however, lagged behind, unaccountably, in this movement.
A survey of Latin American government in this era must also take
account of the appearance of a new member of the family of Spanish
American republics — Cuba. Though the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’ had re-
mained in Spanish hands when continental Spanish America became
independent, it had rested there uneasily. Soon after the close of the
American Civil War the discontent of Cubans with the discriminatory and
exploitative Spanish colonial regime brought on the first powerful move-
ment for the independence of the island. In 1868 a revolutionary assembly
had declared for independence, the end of slavery, and the establishment
of a liberal and democratic republican regime. Led by the aristocratic
Carlos Maria de Cespedes and other men of rank and station, the rebels
appealed to Cubans of all classes. Some Latin American republics recog-
nised the Cuban republic but the United States did not. Failure to secure
recognition made it hard to secure munitions and the war degenerated
into guerrilla operations. The Spanish authorities were unable to suppress
the guerrillas and the war hung on for ten years. Finally, the exhaustion of
both sides led to a compromise ‘Pacto del Zanjon’ with the Spanish
governor and commander-in-chief. General Martinez Campos. Not all
the promises made at this time were kept by the Spaniards and revolu-
tionary unrest continued to smoulder. The Cuban spirit of nationality was
fanned during these years by the writings and by the example of Jose
Marti who, in prison and in exile, personified the yearnings of Cubans for
freedom. In 1895 the revolution broke out once more. Marti was killed
early in the initial campaign, but, in death as in life, his career unified the
Cubans and the revolt became increasingly formidable. The rebel guerrilla
policy of burning cane fields was paralled by the Spanish policy of placing
the rural population in concentration camps. The widespread destruction
of life and property and the hardships and sufferings of Cubans were
publicised throughout Europe and America.
The story of the eventual intervention of the United States, three years
after the beginning of the revolution, is outside the scope of this chapter.
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The outcome of the ensuing Spanish- American War was the total destruc-
tion of Spanish power in America. This fact is well known. It should also
be realised, however, that Cubans believed that they had won their own
freedom. Even during the period of hostilities with Spain there had been
friction between Cuban and American military authorities. When the
United States set up a military government in Cuba the islanders were
dismayed. At the outset of United States intervention Congress had
formally announced that the United States harboured no annexationist
plans and that it desired an independent Cuba. At the close of the war
annexationist feeling appeared to be growing. It was not sufficient to
bring about a reversal of the earlier stand, but the United States did force
on Cuba the famous limitation on the sovereignty of the new republic
known as the Platt Amendment. Firmly embedded both in the permanent
treaty between the United States and Cuba and in the Cuban Constitution,
the Platt Amendment provided among other matters that the United
States might intervene in Cuba for the preservation of ‘ Cuban independ-
ence, the maintenance of a government for the protection of life, property,
and individual liberty’. When the Cubans reluctantly accepted these con-
ditions under duress the American military government was withdrawn
and the Cuban Republic assumed control of the island in 1902. The end
of the Spanish empire in America was significant in many ways but not
least because there no longer remained any barrier to the re-establishment
of cordiality between Spain and her one-time colonies, and the rapproche-
ment between Spanish and Spanish American artists, writers, and intel-
lectuals was to be a major cultural fact of the ensuing age.
Conflict and rivalry among the Latin American states had a significant
effect upon their political and economic fife in the later nineteenth
century. Conflicts often grew out of boundary disputes, a large number of
which remained unsettled owing to the nationalistic intransigence of the
parties and the difficulties created by the lack of exact geographical know-
ledge concerning the unsettled and remote areas usually involved. In
addition, more powerful states sought to dominate weaker neighbours
and by such policies awoke the hostilities of still other countries. In the
course of time there came to be a kind of balance of power, centring on
the more powerful South American states, into which most of the other
countries of the continent were drawn. In Central America the same pro-
cess was apparent in miniature, but remained unrelated to the system of
South American relationships.
This continental system evolved from earlier local conflicts in the Rio
de la Plata area and among the republics of the Pacific coast. In the
former region the elements of conflict were the rival ambitions of Argen-
tina and Brazil. Both attempted to influence the political affairs of their
smaller neighbours, Uruguay and Paraguay, to their advantage. In 1870
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the destructive Paraguayan War had come to an end with the exhaustion
of that small but warlike country and the death of its ambitious dictator,
Francisco Solano Lopez, after almost five years of struggle against the
combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Both of the two
larger victorious countries sought territorial cessions and indemnities
from Paraguay and both tried to check the designs of the other to draw
the defeated country into its sphere of influence. It had also become
traditional for Brazil and Argentina to favour opposing factions in the
constantly disturbed politics of Uruguay. Largely as a result of these
antagonisms Argentina and Brazil were drawn into a competition for
military supremacy. Both nations began to develop more highly trained
professional army officers (the Argentine military academy was founded
in 1870). By purchasing vessels abroad both Brazil and Argentina laid
the foundations for modem navies.
On the Pacific coast international relations at the beginning of the
decade of the i87o’s had been harmonious. Only a few years earlier Chile,
Ecuador, and Bolivia had made common cause with Peru in the latter’s
resistance to Spanish naval intervention. However, beneath the surface,
there was a tradition of jealousy between Chile and Pern. In the colonial
period Peru had been the seat of Spanish viceregal authority and had
usually been favoured over the outlying province of Chile. These ancient
rivalries, which might otherwise have remained dormant, were revived by
the rise of the nitrate industry in the arid coastal region of southern Peru
and Bolivia. Chilean businessmen were active in the exploitation of this
new form of mineral wealth and the Chilean government began to press
its previously inactive claims to part of this desert territory now suddenly
of enormous value. Bolivia, weak and misgoverned, gave ground before
Chilean diplomatic pressure and in 1866 signed a treaty ceding territory
south of latitude 25 0 S. and agreeing to a sort of condominium with Chile
for the territory between latitude 23° S. and 25 0 S. in which both countries
would be free to exploit such resources as guano and nitrates and would
share the revenue derived from such activity. But there followed in 1873
an alliance between Peru and Bolivia. Chilean historians explain this as a
step toward a common policy of monopoly prices in the nitrate industry
on the part of the two countries and as an attempt to check Chilean parti-
cipation in it. Peruvian and Bolivian writers interpret the alliance as a
purely defensive measure against an apparently aggressive neighbour and
deny the existence of any secret articles or accompanying agreements.
The 1866 treaty between Chile and Bolivia had not worked satisfac-
torily. The countries did not find it possible to agree about the sharing of
revenue. Chilean protests led to the signature of a new treaty in 1874
which settled the boundary at 24 0 S. and provided that for twenty-five
years Bolivia would not increase the taxes levied by her on Chilean nitrate
firms operating within her jurisdiction. The Bolivian president, Daza,
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caught between the pressures exerted by his two stronger neighbours,
elected to co-operate with Peru. He raised export taxes levied on a
Chilean nitrate company at Antofagasta. In spite of the protests of the
company and of the Chilean government the Bolivian authorities per-
sisted and, upon non-payment of taxes, seized the properties of the
Chilean concern. Chilean forces then immediately occupied Antofagasta
in February 1879. The Peruvian government attempted to mediate the
dispute between Chile and Bolivia, but Chile, believing that Bolivian
policy had been arrived at in connivance with Peru, refused to accept the
offer and demanded the immediate dissolution of the treaty of alliance
between Peru and Bolivia of 1873. War followed the refusal of the allies
to meet this demand.
The War of the Pacific, as it was called, went through various stages.
In the first of these Chile seized the Bolivian littoral, but further advance
was checked by the inability of the Chilean fleet to control the sea-lanes
until they were finally able to put out of action the speedy Peruvian
cruiser Huascar. In the next stage a Chilean force defeated allied forces
and occupied the province of Tarapacd. The disastrous course of
the war at the end of 1879 brought about a political crisis in Peru.
President Mariano Prado disconcerted the nation by suddenly leaving
the country for Europe, ostensibly on a mission to buy arms. Shortly
after this extraordinary event Nicolas de Pierola led a successful uprising
and with the united support of the whole nation attempted to organise the
continued defence of the country. The Chilean army, however, succeeded
in defeating the Peruvians first at Tacna and later at Arica. By the middle
of 1880 both of these provinces were completely in Chilean hands. Peace
negotiations attempted at this time failed, as did the clumsy and badly
directed efforts of the United States to exert its good offices or to mediate.
At the end of 1880 Chilean forces moved north against Lima. In January
1881 the Peruvian capital was captured after severe fighting in the out-
skirts of the city. The Pierola regime collapsed and resistance was only
maintained by certain guerrilla forces in the interior. Peace negotiations
were made difficult by the hostility created by the looting and destruction
of property by the occupying army. None of various Peruvian leaders
was able to secure general support or to find a basis for negotiation with
Chile. Finally, however, General Miguel Iglesias accepted the inevitable
and signed the Treaty of Ancon, which ceded the province of Tarapaca to
Chile and provided for Chilean occupation of Tacna and Arica for a ten-
year period to be followed by a plebiscite to decide the ultimate disposition
of the two provinces.
The War of the Pacific had repercussions apart from its effects on the
belligerents. One of these was in the relations between Chile and Argen-
tina. For decades the two nations had been involved in a dispute over
boundaries in the southern extremity of the continent in an area which
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had been uninhabited except by a few Indians until Chile founded the
town of Punta Arenas at mid-century, but which both countries began to
regard as increasingly important. The claims of both countries were far
apart and neither was willing to compromise. Argentina favoured delay
in the hope that its more rapid growth in wealth and population would
eventually give it the advantage. Chile unsuccessfully tried to get Brazilian
support for its claims. A crisis came during the War of the Pacific. Chile
could not afford to maintain a strong position during that conflict as this
might dispose Argentina to intervene in the war. A treaty was accordingly
agreed to in 1 88 1 which surrendered most of the disputed territory in Pata-
gonia to Argentina and gave Chile control only over the Straits of Magellan.
The years which followed the War of the Pacific saw a heightened
international rivalry among Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Chile had
achieved recognition as the foremost power on the Pacific coast of South
America. Its military success led Argentina, which still had pending a
dispute with Chile as to the exact location of the mountain frontier between
the two countries, to improve the size and effectiveness of its army and
navy. The tension between Brazil and Argentina was relieved in 1889
when they agreed to accept arbitration of their dispute in the territory of
Misiones on the upper Parana, and demarcation of the frontier was com-
plete by the end of the century. In 1 896 Argentina and Chile submitted
to arbitration their dispute as to whether their boundaries should follow
the peaks of the cordillera or the continental divide. Between 1899 and
1902 the decisions under this agreement were handed down. Talk of war
which had grown insistent for a while died down and there came a marked
improvement in the relations of the two nations. Most of the unsettled
boundary questions of Brazil which remained in 1900 were successfully
dealt with during the first decade of the twentieth century by the celebrated
diplomat and statesman, the Baron de Rio Branco. Between Venezuela
and Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, and among various Central American
countries these stubborn boundary controversies hung on to create
difficulty throughout the first half of the ensuing century.
In the cultural life of Latin America new elements which appeared in
the period 1870-1900 came from the assimilation of European ideas and
movements, especially those of France and England. In those aspects of
civilisation which depended in part on the availability of funds, as, for
example in the fields of public education, the improvement of university
libraries and facilities, the establishment of libraries and museums, and
the development of monumental architecture, the countries which were
making the greatest advances in wealth took the lead, as might be expected.
In the field of literature and the arts, however, there was no correlation
with economic progress and works of genius were produced in poor and
undeveloped countries.
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The supremacy of French influence and the primacy of French taste
were unquestioned in this era. The cultivated classes read French books
and university students wrestled with text-books in that language. The new
avenues and boulevards in the greater Latin American cities were to a
large extent replicas of the Parisian boulevards : the Avenida de Mayo in
Buenos Aires, the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, and the Avenida
Rio Branco which followed the pattern a few years later in Rio de Janeiro.
The improvement of communications and of wealth made it possible for
the women of the upper classes to dress according to the mode of Paris.
In the field of public education German and United States influence was
important. Though all the Latin American countries recognised the im-
portance of a literate citizenry and had provided by law for some kind of
public education, it was only in a few countries that real progress was
made in combating illiteracy. The greatest progress was made by
Argentina where Domingo F. Sarmiento, under the inspiration of studies
and travels in Europe and in the United States, was responsible during his
presidency (1868-74) for the establishment of normal schools and the
establishment of standards and plans for an educational system under the
control of the provinces but supervised and encouraged by the national
government. Improvement of teaching was made possible by bringing in
foreign experts and establishing publications in the field of education.
Progress of a similar type on a much smaller scale was made by Uruguay
after 1880 under the leadership of Sarmiento’s admirer, Jose Pedro Varela.
In Brazil Pedro II had done much to further education, especially after
1870. By the end of the imperial period there were over six thousand
primary schools and secondary schools in all the provinces, including the
Collegio Imperial Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro.
Except in the countries mentioned, little was done to extend education
to the masses; but progress was made in many other countries in higher
and special education. The University of Chile, established early in the
republican period, was in many ways a model in Latin America. In the
latter decades of the century most of the countries expanded and improved
curricula and facilities in their leading institutions. These remained every-
where, however, teaching and professional schools devoted very largely to
law and medicine. The research function of the university was not as yet
developed. Nevertheless, in all the more important countries the estab-
lishment or the improvement of national libraries and of museums of
natural history provided materials for future study.
In spite of the great tradition of Spanish art on which they could draw
and in some countries the existence of an Amerindian artistic inheritance
of great value, the Latin American nations achieved little that was im-
portant or original in the arts during the later nineteenth century. Music
was almost entirely derivative and consisted of efforts to achieve skilful
execution in the approved French and Italian manner of the works of
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such romantics as Liszt and Verdi. Sculpture was limited to the produc-
tion of commemorative pieces for public squares in the academic manner
and much of this was actually done in European studios. In painting there
was more variety. Though there was a great deal of academic portraiture
of wealthy worthies and production of battle pieces and other historical
works of nationalistic inspiration for the decoration of public buildings,
there was also work that went beyond this. The Uruguayan painter Juan
Manuel Blanes, who did much of his work in Argentina, was an excellent
portraitist and also produced dramatic canvases somewhat in the manner
of Delacroix. One of the most powerful artists of nineteenth-century
Argentina was Prilidiano Pueyrredon, most of whose work was done
before 1870, but who lived on into the later period. He produced notable
portraits in which the artist’s handling of colour was remarkable; he also
produced genre scenes of great interest. Somewhat later, toward the end
of the century, the most eminent Argentine painter was Eduardo Sivori in
whose work it is possible to trace the influence of Courbet and Manet. In
Mexico the most distinguished painting of the period was done by Jose
Maria Velasco, a landscapist with remarkable gifts. His studies of scenes
in Mexico rivalled, if they did not surpass, the work of artists in the
United States in this period who painted the Rocky Mountains and the
American West. Velasco, who was himself taught by an Italian master,
was later the teacher of Diego Rivera who distinguished himself in later
years as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth-century Mexican school.
It was in literature that Latin Americans achieved the most distinguished
and original work in this period. Two movements stand out as major
aspects of the literary history of the later nineteenth century : the evolution
of the novel from earlier romantic forms through the transitional form of
the regionalist schools to the fully developed realistic, and later to the
naturalist, style. Brazil was the most important country in the field of the
novel. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is almost universally recognised
as the greatest novelist of Latin America. His work bridges the entire
period of transition to realism. At the close of the century Euclydes da
Cunha with his remarkable literary-philosophical-sociological book Os
Sertoes, and Jose Pereira da Gra9a Aranha with his study of clashing
peoples in a frontier environment, Chanaan, ushered in the naturalist
school. Though a similar movement took place in Spanish American
prose, it came to fruition somewhat later than in Brazil with the work of
Gallegos, Rivera, and a host of others in the early twentieth century.
Before 1900 the romantic vein had, however, been exhausted and realism
introduced through the medium of the costumbrista sketch, the gaucho
literature made popular by Jose Hernandez and others, and most of all
by the novels of Alberto Blest Gana of Chile. Naturalism appears at the
beginning of the twentieth century in the work of the Mexican, Federico
Gamboa, whose work seems to have been patterned on that of Zola.
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In poetry Spanish American literature went through a period of great
richness and originality beginning in the 1 890’s. The modernista movement
owed something to the inspiration of French poets like Verlaine and
Baudelaire, but it was even more an American declaration of indepen-
dence from Spanish traditional limitations, both in poetic form and in
vocabulary. The greatest exponent and the founder of the movement was
Ruben Dario of Nicaragua. The freedom and sensitivity to all kinds of
sense impressions exemplified in Dario’s verse and prose and his ingenuity
in inventing new ways to express them met an immediate response in the
work of other young poets: Leopoldo Lugones in Argentina, Jose Santos
Chocano in Peru, and Amado Nervo of Mexico, who are only a few of the
most renowned members of this school. From Latin America modernismo
spread to Spain and became a major force working upon all subsequent
writers in the Spanish language.
These young men who were revitalising Latin American letters at the
close of the century were not, however, as well known in 1900, nor did
they have as much influence on the nineteenth century as a number of
older men, more frequently politicians, newspaper men, teachers, or pro-
fessional men. In the Caribbean Marti’s influence went far beyond his
beloved Cuba. More than any other one person he was responsible for
the growth of a sense of brotherhood among literate Spanish Americans.
Other intellectuals also exerted influence beyond the borders of their own
countries. At the beginning of the period under review that could be said
of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Argentine enemy of tyrants and enthu-
siast for education. His early exile led him to Chile and his subsequent
travels for study and in diplomatic service took him far and wide. His
influence on Varela in Uruguayan education has been noted. He also did
much to draw together educators in the United States and Argentina. At
the end of the century the Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rodo achieved great
influence on young people throughout Spanish America. His famous
essay Ariel (1900), which preached Spanish American spiritual unity and
warned against the supposed materialism of civilisation in the United
States, became the bible of idealistic university students and literary men
during the next generation. In the Caribbean area Eugenio Maria de
Hostos of Puerto Rico, as reformer and later as revolutionary, travelled
far and wide in the New World and always as a propagandist for the anti-
imperialist cause — against Spain, or against the United States. He also
worked manfully for the improvement of education in his own country
and in the Dominican Republic. Enrique Jose Varona exercised a very
similar influence in Cuba as patriot, philosopher, educator, and poet.
The versatility of many of these men was a peculiarly Latin American
trait. Many of them are difficult to classify because they combined so
many different kinds of activity. Two examples must suffice to illustrate
this many-sidedness. Bartolome Mitre’s name is outstanding in three
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different fields. He was the outstanding political leader of Buenos Aires
in the critical period of Argentine national organisation. He fought with
varied success in civil wars from the campaign against the dictator Rosas
(1852) to a fruitless rebellion against Sarmiento’s administration (1874)
but he also was the leader of the Argentine forces in the Paraguayan War
and successfully led his troops in battle. Mitre must also be remembered
as the first journalist of his age in Argentina. He founded La Nation,
from his day to the present, one of the outstanding newspapers of
Argentina. In still a third field of activity Mitre became perhaps the most
able historian of his country and one of the small number of Spanish
American historians of his day who are still read today. His major works,
La historia de San Martin y de la independencia americana, and La historia
de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina, were works of Mitre’s old age
which appeared in the 1880’s, but which combined a vivid narrative style
with a respect for documentary evidence. Nationalist that he was, he
could not situate himself coolly outside of his theme, but he produced a
kind of history comparable to that of Macaulay in England or of George
Bancroft in the United States.
The other example of versatility among Latin American men of letters
is primarily a historian, the Chilean, Diego Barros Arana. He is most
widely known for his monumental Historia general de Chile which
covered the history of his country from before the Spanish conquest to the
close of the era of its political independence, a work which is the most
important and the most workmanlike Latin American product of that
type of professional historical research that used to be referred to as
scientific of the nineteenth century. In addition to his work as an historian
Barros was also a figure of the first magnitude in the history of Chilean
education. A doctrinaire liberal, he worked throughout his long career to
create a strong secular system of public education. As a teacher in the
celebrated Instituto Nacional in Santiago and as a professor in the
University of Chile he was personally a vital influence on two generations
of young Chilean intellectuals. As rector of the university he influenced
policy toward the organisation of higher education. A third kind of
activity led him to serve his country in the national congress, where he was
a staunch liberal, and as a diplomat. He put his historical talents to work
in the building of Chile’s case against Argentina for the ownership of
Patagonia and was the negotiator of the treaty in which Chile finally
surrendered its claim in 1881 during the War of the Pacific.
Looking back on the Latin America of the latter decades of the nine-
teenth century it is possible to understand the optimism and the belief in
progress which so many Latin Americans felt at that time. Economic and
material progress did occur, though much of this was distributed very
unevenly. Political stability in some countries increased; a high price,
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however, was paid for this in terms of oligarchical rule that disregarded
broad public interests ; in many countries where civil wars and dictatorial
regimes seemed to have become endemic it was hard to see any improve-
ment. Another decade and a half was to pass before a new era would set
in. The effect of the world upheaval that accompanied the first World
War would be felt in Latin America, changing traditional relations as
Russia became revolutionary and the United States world position was
transformed. Only in that newer era would movements for political and
social reform take place in Latin America paralleling the increasing pace
of economic change and offering hope of a better life to the submerged
millions of the continent. But, as we have noted above, major factors in
twentieth-century Latin American history — the organisation of labour
and its political activity ; industrialisation and the growth of a middle class
in some areas; revolutionary movements, nationalist and proletarian —
were foreshadowed in this period which was on the surface as stagnant in
social reform as it was dynamic in economic progress.
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CHAPTER XX
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
T he last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the European
balance of power at its most perfect: five great powers (with a
doubtful sixth), each able to maintain its independence, none strong
enough to dominate the others. The irreconcilable antagonism between
France and Germany, and the equally irreconcilable, though less per-
sistent, antagonism between Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans,
prevented the creation of any preponderant combination. The balance of
power took on the appearance of a natural law, self-operating and self-
adjusting; Europe enjoyed the longest period of peace known in modem
times; and the powers turned their energies outwards to ‘imperialist’
expansion. All acquired empires ; some at their own backdoor, the others
overseas.
The Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in July 1870, created this
exceptional balance. It began as a French attempt to arrest the progress
of German unity ; instead it freed Europe from the shadow of French pre-
dominance without putting German predominance in its place. It was the
last war fought solely in Europe and confined to European great powers.
It was indeed confined to two powers. This was unexpected. Great Britain
was genuinely neutral once Belgium was secured. But Austria-Hungary
prepared to intervene on the French side, though only after French
victories. Russia first talked vaguely of threatening Austria-Hungary into
neutrality; then, with equal vagueness, planned to compete with her for
French favour. These calculations came to an abrupt stop as the campaign
developed. The first battles on the frontier went against France. On
3 September the main French army was defeated and compelled to sur-
render at Sedan. Napoleon III became a prisoner. The French empire
was overthrown, and the Republic proclaimed in Paris.
Sedan ended the war as a struggle for mastery in Europe. The long
centuries of French predominance were over. Germany was free to
arrange her own destinies. The war was prolonged by the German demand
for Alsace and Lorraine. The ostensible reason for this was military
security; the deeper cause was a desire to satisfy national feeling. The new
Germany should get off to a good start by recovering the lands of the old
Reich. The French raised the standard of national defence; and the war
which had begun in the cabinets became a war of peoples. Thiers toured
Europe, seeking allies. In vain. Neither Austria-Hungary nor Russia
feared a German victory. The Austrians hoped for German backing in the
Near East; the Russians calculated that a resentful France would keep
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Germany in check. Only Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, wished to
protest against the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine without consulting the
inhabitants, on grounds of morality, not of power; and he received no
support from his cabinet.
Besides, the Russians twisted international relations eastwards by de-
nouncing the neutralisation of the Black Sea, imposed by the Treaty of
Paris in 1856. The British threatened war or, at any rate, a revival of ‘the
Crimean coalition’. Bismarck did not want a situation which might pro-
vide France with allies or at least enable her to air her case before an
international meeting. He solved the crisis neatly by paying Russia and
Great Britain with the same cheque. He proposed a conference, confined
to the Black Sea clauses and pledged in advance to their abolition. Thus
Russia got freedom from her servitude; the British vindicated the prin-
ciple that treaties could be changed only by international agreement; and
Bismarck was rewarded by a general promise that the conference, which
met in London in January 1871, should not mention the war between
France and Germany.
The French had therefore to rely on their own strength. This was not
enough to reverse the verdict of Sedan. Gambetta sounded the Jacobin
appeal of 1793 — the levee en masse, and the country in danger. Though he
brought new armies into the field, these could not defeat the Germans nor
prevent the fall of Paris. At the end of January 1871 the French had to
accept the German terms; and these became the definitive peace of
Frankfurt on 10 May. France lost Alsace and Lorraine, though retaining
Belfort at the last moment; paid an indemnity of five milliard francs (a
sum exactly proportioned to the indemnity which Napoleon I had im-
posed on Prussia in 1 807) ; and had to support a German army of occupa-
tion until the indemnity was paid. This was certainly a victor’s peace on the
Napoleonic model. Yet Bismarck did not attempt to bind the future.
France remained a great power. The Treaty of Frankfurt did not limit her
armed forces or control her foreign policy. The path of revenge was open
if she wished to take it. She could not do so. Sedan and its outcome did
not so much change the balance of power in Europe as symbolise that it
had changed; and the balance went on turning against France. Germany
continued to increase in population and economic resources. France
remained almost static.
Few contemporaries appreciated this. They expected an early war of
revenge. Though the French, under the leadership of Thiers, followed a
policy of ‘fulfilment’, they also introduced universal military service on
the German model, and reorganised their armed forces. Bismarck made
isolation of France the mainspring of his foreign policy. In 1873 he
brought Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia together in the League
of the Three Emperors — ostensibly a conservative Holy Alliance against
the moribund socialist international which Karl Marx had just shipped off
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to an early death in New York; in fact no more than mutual abstention
from a French alliance. The League carried within itself the germs of a
mortal sickness : Austria-Hungary and Russia did not renounce their rival
ambitions in the Balkans. Instead, their agreement contained the strange
provision that, even when they fell into dispute there, they would not
allow the conflict ‘to overshadow the considerations of a higher order
which they have at heart’. Like the Holy Alliance, the League of the
Three Emperors was a fair-weather system, which would be blown away
in a Balkan gale.
The Balkans were however still quiet, and France the likely storm-
centre. In 1873 Thiers was driven from office; and his monarchist suc-
cessors wished to restore French prestige by an active foreign policy.
Dreaming nostalgically of a Catholic League, they first patronised the
pope — prisoner in the Vatican since the Italian occupation of Rome on
20 September 1870. Then, abandoning this course in 1874, they flew at
higher game and patronised the German Roman Catholics in the Kultur-
kampf. Bismarck, always ready to perceive widespread conspiracies
against himself, detected — or so he claimed — the hand of international
clericalism. At least, this seems to be the most reasonable explanation of
the ‘war-in-sight’ crisis which he unleashed in April 1875. It is unlikely
that Bismarck actually planned a preventive war; such a course was
against his deepest instincts. But he hoped to frighten the French out of
their clericalism and perhaps out of their rearmament. Instead, Decazes,
the French Foreign Minister, exploited the crisis to his own profit.
Simulating alarm, he appealed for protection to the other powers; and
they responded. Though Austria-Hungary remained silent, both Russia
and Great Britain expostulated at Berlin. Bismarck shammed surprise and
repudiated all aggressive intention. The crisis died away. It had been a
score for France, though of a peculiar kind. Great Britain and Russia had
combined to protect France and save the peace, but the peace they saved
was the peace of Frankfurt. Neither wished to reverse Sedan, only to
ensure that it should not be repeated. Both were satisfied with the existing
balance. Both opposed a German attack on France ; neither would sup-
port a French attack on Germany. Hence the ‘war-in-sight’ crisis para-
doxically determined that there would be no war in Europe for more than
a generation.
With relations between France and Germany thus stabilised, only the
Balkans remained as a topic of conflict. In July 1875 they burst into
flames. The Turkish province of Bosnia broke into revolt. Neither Russia
nor Austria-Hungary wished to open the Eastern Question; but once it
was opened, Russia could not abandon the Balkan Slavs, Austria-
Hungary dared not let them succeed. Both tried to observe the pledge
which they had given in the League of the Three Emperors. They sought to
avert the crisis by a programme of Balkan reforms. Andrassy, the Austro-
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Hungarian Foreign Minister, first proposed that the consuls of the powers
should settle the Bosnian revolt on the spot. Then he devised the note of
30 December 1875, containing reforms which the powers should recom-
mend to Turkey. Next, at a meeting with Bismarck and Gorchakov, the
Russian Chancellor, he produced the Berlin Memorandum of 13 May
1 876, which contained not only reforms but a grudging hin t of ‘ sanctions ’
to enforce them. All these schemes broke on the obstinacy of the Turkish
government which held, with some justification, that reform would lead
to the disintegration of the Ottoman empire.
Russia and Austria-Hungary were drifting apart. Andrassy would not
go beyond advice, given to Turkey by the Three Emperors. Gorchakov
wished to impose reforms in the name of the Concert of Europe. He
brought France into the negotiations; and this inevitably brought in
Great Britain also. The British had once been the great proponents of the
Concert of Europe ; but, since their failure over Schleswig in 1 864, they had
withdrawn from European affairs. Isolation was the keystone of British
policy; and the counterpart of isolation is isolated action. Lacking allies
and repudiating diplomacy, the British had only the choice: all or nothing.
Either they turned their backs on a problem; or they appealed to force.
There was no middle course; and it is no accident that between 1871 and
1904 Great Britain was alone in using the formal threat of war against
another great power — in 1878 and 1885 against Russia, in 1898 against
France. The British government had swallowed the consular mission and
the Andrdssy note, though principally in order to guard Turkish interests.
The Berlin memorandum was too much for them — particularly as it
reached London at the weekend. They rejected the memorandum and
sent the fleet to Besika Bay, thus encouraging the Turks to defy the
powers.
This the Turks were always willing to do. The suppression of the revolt
was beyond their strength. In June revolt spread to Bulgaria; and the
Turks answered with the ‘Bulgarian horrors’ — the worst atrocities of the
ni n eteenth century, until eclipsed by the Armenian massacres twenty years
later. The Russian government, though still shrinking from war, was
driven on by the groundswell of Slav sentiment within Russia. At first
Gorchakov hoped that the Ottoman empire would collapse of itself; and
at Zakupy (Reichstadt) in July, he reached agreement with Andrassy that
they would allow this to happen. His hope was disappointed. There was
deadlock in the Balkans : more revolts, more massacres, but no collapse.
Russian intervention drew nearer, Alexander II himself foreshadowing it
publicly in November. Gorchakov was desperately anxious to save Russia
from repeating the isolation and failure of the Crimean War. He called on
Bismarck to repay the supposed Russian service in 1870 by holding
Austria-Hungary neutral. Bismarck refused. He claimed later that he
would have gone with Russia ‘through thick and thin’, if the Russians in
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return had guaranteed Germany’s tenure of Alsace and Lorraine. This
was a red herring. The survival of Austria-Hungary as a great power was
an essential part of Bismarck’s system, both at home and abroad; and,
while he had no objection to Russia’s success in the Balkans, this must be
in agreement with Austria-Hungary, not achieved against her. Bismarck’s
‘great refusal’ was a decisive moment in European relations. From
refusing to support Russia against Austria-Hungary it was a short step to
supporting Austria-Hungary against Russia. In 1879 Bismarck took this
step ; and so set the pattern for the future.
Failing Germany, Gorchakov tried France. Here, too, he was dis-
appointed. The French pleaded that they had not recovered from the
defeats of 1870 — a convenient, though genuine, excuse which enabled
them to sidestep the Eastern crisis without offending Russia. The last
Russian resource was the Concert of Europe; and this did not altogether
fail them. Even Great Britain moved towards the Concert. The Bulgarian
horrors had produced a passionate campaign of protest in England under
Gladstone’s leadership ; and the Conservative government had to favour
the reform of Turkey. In December 1 876 a conference of the great powers
met at Constantinople — of all the many gatherings which wrestled with
the Eastern Question, the only one to meet on the spot. Once more
sweeping reforms were devised ; once more the Turks evaded them — this
time by the ingenious trick of first proclaiming a constitution and then
insisting that all changes must be referred to a constituent assembly which
never met. Yet the conference served Russia’s purpose. Though the
powers would not impose the reforms which the conference had devised,
they could not object when Russia set out to do so. The Concert, having
failed to reform Turkey, would not now protect her.
Even the British were now willing to stand aside. They insisted that
nothing must be done to disturb Egypt — a remote speculation where
Gorchakov at once met their wishes. They also declared that they would
not tolerate a Russian occupation of Constantinople, ‘even temporary’.
Here, too, Gorchakov replied sympathetically. He had no desire to see
Russia saddled with responsibility for Constantinople. But if Turkey
collapsed, who could guarantee the outcome? And Gorchakov left it open
whether he would then cheat the British or the victorious Russian generals.
From Austria-Hungary Russia needed something more positive than
tolerance. She needed a firm promise of neutrality if her armies were to
pass safely through the bottleneck of Roumania. Andrassy was ready for a
bargain. In the last resort, he preferred a limited Russian success against
Turkey to a great European war which would shatter the existing set-up
in the Habsburg monarchy, almost as much by victory as by defeat; and
Gorchakov on his side, cool towards Pan-Slav ambitions, was ready to
limit Russia’s prospective gains. The Budapest conventions, signed on
15 January 1877, laid down that there should be ‘no great compact state,
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Slav or other’, if Turkey fell to pieces. In return Austria-Hungary pro-
mised to observe benevolent neutrality in a war between Russia and
Turkey, and to disregard the triple guarantee of Turkey in which she had
joined after the Crimean War. This was a great stroke by Gorchakov
despite the restriction. The Crimean coalition was dissolved; and
Andrassy in fact kept his promise of neutrality right up to the Congress
of Berlin. Besides, who could tell what would happen in the Balkans if
Turkey really fell to pieces? Here too Gorchakov could decide whether
to cheat Andrassy or the Pan-Slavs. The immediate gain was what
mattered. Thanks to Gorchakov’s diplomacy, Russia was free — as never
before in the nineteenth century — to settle the Eastern Question by her
own armed strength.
Here was the great surprise. Russian armed strength proved inadequate
for the purpose. On 24 April Russia declared war against Turkey,
ostensibly to enforce the recommendations of the Constantinople con-
ference. Russian armies advanced through Roumania and crossed the
Danube. There they were arrested by the fortress of Plevna, and battered
themselves into exhaustion against it before it fell on 1 1 December. The
prolonged engagement of Plevna — battle rather than siege — foreshadowed
the grinding trench-warfare of the First World War. But unlike those
battles, it changed the course of history. In June, when the Russians first
ran against Plevna, Turkey-in-Europe seemed doomed. By December the
Russian armies were worn down; and, equally important, British opinion
had swung round. The heroic defence of Plevna obliterated the Bulgarian
horrors; and the Conservative government could revert to its original
policy of supporting Turkey. The Russian armies staggered to the gates of
Constantinople by the end of January 1878; but the Ottoman empire did
not collapse. Though the Turkish armies had almost melted away, the
Russians could not give the final push. It only needed first the rumour and
then the reality of the British fleet before Constantinople to bring the war
to an end.
The Russians had assumed that the Ottoman empire would fall of
itself, once war started. It had not done so; and the Russians were now
stuck for peace terms. They first thought of demanding the opening of the
Straits; but, since Russia had no Black Sea fleet, this — though a theo-
retical gain — would be a practical disadvantage. They therefore fell back
on inflating the principal proposal of the Constantinople conference and
demanded autonomy for a ‘Big Bulgaria’. This had no Machiavellian
intent. A national state seemed the only alternative to Turkish rule; and
the Russian peacemakers drew the frontier according to the best ethno-
graphical knowledge of the time. But the Turks realised that Big Bulgaria
would provoke opposition from other powers ; and therefore accepted the
peace of San Stefano, signed on 3 March, with every confidence that it would
soon be overthrown. A general war seemed in the offing. The British kept
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their fleet at Constantinople, and demonstratively moved Indian troops
to Malta. Andrassy, though evading British requests for an alliance, also
evaded Russian requests for a promise of neutrality in a further war. No
one has divined his real intent, which was probably unknown to himself.
But the Russians dared not risk a renewal of war without firm assurance
of Austro-Hungarian neutrality, nor perhaps even with it. The British
were ready to face war without allies and even in fact without armed
forces of any size. It was a contest of nerve; and the British won. On
30 May the Russians agreed to submit the Treaty of San Stefano to an
international Congress, with the understanding that Big Bulgaria should
disappear. Salisbury, who had become British Foreign Secretary at the
beginning of April, rounded off his achievement with two other agree-
ments. He guaranteed Turkey-in-Asia, receiving a lease of Cyprus in
exchange; and he secured the belated backing of Austria-Hungary against
Big Bulgaria.
The Congress of Berlin which met on 13 June 1878 was a grandiose
assembly of European statesmen — the German and Russian Chancellors,
the Prime Minister of Great Britain (the first ever to attend an inter-
national meeting), and the Foreign Ministers of the great powers. Big
Bulgaria dissolved into three: a quasi-independent principality; an auto-
nomous province of eastern Roumelia ; and a remnant called ‘ Macedonia ’,
which was pushed back under Ottoman rule. Austria-Hungary undertook
the administration of Bosnia and Hercegovina, where the revolts had
started. Unexpectedly, the Congress also produced a grave challenge to
the rule of the Straits. Salisbury had agreed on 30 May that the Black Sea
port of Batum should go to Russia; but British opinion was outraged
when this became known. To calm opinion at home, Salisbury announced
that henceforth Great Britain would only regard herself as bound to
respect ‘the independent decisions’ of the sultan in regard to the closing
of the Straits. In British eyes the sultan was independent only when he was
pro-British. Hence they claimed to be free to pass the Straits whenever it
suited them. This was a terrifying prospect for Russia; and the spectre of a
British fleet in the Black Sea haunted Russian policy for almost twenty
years.
The Congress claimed to have averted a great war and to have settled
the Eastern Question. There was not much in either claim. War had been
averted long before the Congress met— in fact when the Russian armies
faltered in front of Constantinople. On the other hand, the Congress
could not revive the Ottoman empire as an independent great power. The
events of 1875-8 ended its real strength; and though it tottered on for
another thirty-odd years, this was largely because the great powers were
busy elsewhere and shrank from the turmoil which would follow its over-
throw. The practical results of the Conference were of little effect. The
British fleet never entered the Black Sea until after the collapse of the
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Russian empire; and two out of the three parts into which Bulgaria had
been divided were united within a few years, to the applause of the powers
which had insisted on their separation in 1 878. The Congress did a bad
day’s work when it put Macedonia back under the Turks, and a worse
when it put Bosnia under Austria-Hungary. The first act caused the
Balkan war of 1912; the second exploded the world war of 1914.
Such blunders occur at the best-ordered gathering. The deeper puzzle is
why the Congress made such a fuss about the Balkans at all. Gigantic
changes had taken place on the continent of Europe; still more gigantic
were to happen outside it. Italy and Germany had been united ; France
had lost her primacy and two provinces ; the pope had lost his temporal
power. Soon Africa was to be partitioned ; the empire of China was to be
disputed between the powers. Here were all the greatest statesmen of the
age, assembled in unparalleled number and encompassed by these events.
Yet all they could find to discuss was the fate of a few Balkan villages.
What is more the Eastern Question continued to dominate international
relations for many years after the Congress of Berlin. It shaped the alli-
ances which shot up like mushrooms after summer-rain. Every foreign
mi ni ster revolved his policy around it. Yet nothing happened. The
interminable Eastern crises seemed so many manoeuvres, where great
skill was displayed and everyone went home unhurt in the evening.
Why did it all go on? The diplomatists pointed to the deadlock as
evidence of their sustained skill. Cynical radicals retorted that nothing
happened because nothing serious was at stake and that the Eastern
Question was kept going to provide ‘out-door relief’ for members of the
foreign services. There was something in these explanations. The working
of the balance checked any activity; and the Eastern Question had indeed
become a question of habit. Men had regarded it as of vital importance
for so long that they had forgotten why it was important, if they ever
knew. Perhaps the decisive reason, however, is that the Eastern Question
had become essentially a negative affair. When two powers have rival
ambitions, a compromise between them is often possible. A deal is more
difficult when each merely wants to keep the other out. In the first case,
possession is the actual guarantee of the bargain ; the second demands
reliance on the other’s good faith — and in the Eastern Question this was
lacking. The Russians, apart from a few Pan-Slav hot-heads, merely
wanted to keep the British navy out of the Black Sea; the British merely
wanted to exclude the Russians from Constantinople. But each was con-
vinced of the aggressive designs of the other. Similarly the Austrians
merely wished to prevent any hostile power from controlling the route to
Salonika; and the French wished to preserve their investments in the
Ottoman empire. All of them in fact wanted an independent Turkey ; but
each of them interpreted this to mean that Turkey should be subservient
to itself. A modicum of mutual trust or even of indifference; and the
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Eastern Question would vanish from the international agenda. This
happened some twenty years later when all the powers turned their backs
on the Balkans, much to their own astonishment.
Bismarck, the wisest diplomatic head of the day, always advocated this
course. He described the inhabitants of the Balkans as ‘sheep-stealers’;
and held that the Balkans were not worth the bones of any grenadier, let
alone a Pomeranian. This was certainly true so far as material gain was
concerned. The Balkans were a miserable prize, compared to almost any
other part of the world; and have remained so to the present day. Only
prestige and strategy were at stake; but these count for more than profit.
Bismarck constantly urged the other powers to ignore the Near East; or,
if they would not, to share it out — Constantinople with the east Balkans
to Russia, Salonika with the west to Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain
in control of Egypt and the Suez Canal. Hence his advice to Salisbury
during the Congress: ‘Take Egypt.’ Hence his encouragement to the
French that they should find their share of the bargain in Tunis. The
powers did not welcome his advice. For one thing, each hoped to acquire
its share without yielding anything to others, as the British did four years
later in Egypt. More deeply, the negative nature of their aims stood in the
way. None of them wanted the trouble which partitioning the Near East
would involve.
More deeply still, the powers lacked a common interest or loyalty. This
was the age when the anarchy of sovereign states was at its height; and
when men believed that in international affairs, as in economic relations
between individuals, unchecked liberty for each automatically produced
the best results for all. Gladstone alone preached the Concert of Europe.
This was a noble aim, but how can there be a Concert unless the players
follow the same score? No great principle or belief held Europe together.
Monarchical solidarity had ended ; the solidarity of peoples had not taken
its place. There was not even a common fear — whether of revolution or of
some infidel invader. Instead there was only a universal confidence that
each power could stand on its own feet without bringing European
civilisation, or even itself, to disaster. Bismarck himself judged the Con-
cert contemptuously: ‘Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. It is merely
a geographic expression.’ And again: ‘I only hear a statesman use the
word “Europe” when he wants something for himself.’ Bismarck ac-
cepted the international anarchy, but was confident that he could control
it for his own end. This end was peace. Certainly Germany directed
the ‘system’ so far as there was one; but in Bismarck’s time her only
object was negative — to prevent war, not to make gains. Since the other
powers too had this negative aim, though less consciously, they acquiesced
— with some grumbles — in Bismarck’s direction.
Before the Congress of Berlin Bismarck had helped Russia and Great
Britain towards agreement. In the months after the Congress this agree-
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ment seemed farther off than ever. The British, invigorated by success,
thrust towards new achievements. Salisbury planned to revive the Otto-
man empire under British protection. British military consuls swarmed in
Asia Minor; British agents harassed the sultan with advice which he
usually disregarded. In the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and France sup-
ported what they took to be the winning side. The Crimean coalition
which had disappeared during the recent crisis seemed to be resurrected.
The Russian empire was exhausted by the war. Its rulers were exasperated
and alarmed by these new threats. They appealed to Bismarck for support;
and this time he responded. The Crimean coalition was as unwelcome to
him as it had been to the rulers of Prussia during the Crimean War itself.
On the other hand the prospect of co-operating with Russia against it was
equally unwelcome. Bismarck’s solution — though also anticipated by
Prussian policy during the Crimean War — was at first sight surprising.
Instead of supporting Russia against Great Britain, he concluded on
5 October 1879 a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary against Russia.
He gave a variety of explanations then and thereafter. Sometimes he
alleged that Germany was in imminent danger of attack from Russia and
needed Austro-Hungarian backing; sometimes he claimed that he was
restoring the old greater German union of the Holy Roman Empire. At
one time he proposed making the alliance a fundamental law of the
German Reich; at another he advised his successors to get rid of it at a
convenient opportunity. Historians, both German and foreign, have
added theories of their own.
It is fairly easy to solve the problem of why Bismarck acted as he did in
October 1879 by asking: what was the alternative? The Crimean coalition
would have grown stronger; it would have pressed harder against Russia;
and then there would have followed a new war or else — more likely —
such a humiliation of Russia as would upset the balance of power.
Austria-Hungary and France, the two powers whom Germany had
defeated, would have recovered prestige; and after Russia, it would have
been Germany’s turn. As it was, Austria-Hungary, secured by Germany’s
support, grew cool towards the British; and affairs in the Balkans drifted
towards oblivion. Bismarck made this clear himself when he said to the
Russian ambassador concerning Austria-Hungary: ‘I wanted to dig a
ditch between her and the western powers. ’ He made it even clearer when
he went on from the Austro-German alliance to revive the League of the
Three Emperors, which he succeeded in doing some two years later.
There are deeper problems not so easily solved. The Austro-German
Alliance makes sense as the temporary answer to an immediate difficulty.
But why did Bismarck give it such a rigid permanent form? Precise
alliances, defined in writing, had gone out with the ancien regime, except
as the early prelude to war. No great power had a fixed commitment of
this kind between the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin.
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Now the Austro-German alliance began an era in which every power,
except Great Britain, gave formal pledges of action to support some other.
Yet Bismarck was himself contemptuous of such attempts to bind the
future. Every alliance, he said, had an unwritten clause : rebus sic stantibus.
Perhaps Bismarck, having now become a conservative statesman, not only
wanted things to remain the same, but assumed that he could make them
do so. Perhaps, too, he overlooked that alliances by this time were made
not between monarchs, but between nations. The alliances of the
eighteenth century were family compacts, private bargains between kings
and emperors. The new alliances were absorbed by public opinion even
though their precise terms were unknown — except for those of the Austro-
German Alliance which were published in 1888. Indeed Bismarck’s own
rule worked against himself. The elaborate clauses, with their reservations
and restrictions, were short-lived in their effect. The great names of Triple
Alliance and Franco-Russian Alliance shaped men’s minds, and deter-
mined the pattern of events. Bismarck had meant to preserve his freedom
of manoeuvre when he made the Austro-German alliance. Instead every
great power, including Germany, was taken prisoner by the system of
alliances which he inaugurated.
The contrast between the precise terms of an alliance and its general
significance was shown as soon as the Austro-German Alliance was
signed and throughout its history. Its essential clause was the promise by
the two powers to resist any Russian attack. Bismarck meant precisely
this, and no more. He would not allow the destruction of Austria-
Hungary as a great power, but he would not support her activities in the
Balkans. The Austrians never took the reservation seriously : they always
assumed that Germany was now committed to them ‘ through thick and
thin’. There began a tug-of-war between Vienna and Berlin which lasted
until the Austrians pulled Germany into war in 1914. All Bismarck’s
diplomacy from October 1879 until his fall was an answering tug: an
attempt to escape the inevitable consequences of an alliance which he had
himself brought into existence. The simplest way out in his eyes was to
reconcile Austria-Hungary and Russia ; whenever this broke, as it often did,
on Austrian reluctance, he sought to provide other allies for her so that
Germany need not be involved. His unrivalled skill enabled him to
perform these conjuring tricks with success ; but none of them would have
been necessary if the Austro-German Alliance had not existed.
The Russians presented no difficulties. They asked only for security in
the Near East — the Straits closed to British ships of war, and the Balkan
states left in harmless independence. They were eager to revive the League
of the Three Emperors ; and Bismarck agreed with them once the Austro-
German A lli ance was signed. The Austrians resisted obstinately; their
policy was ‘the permanent blocking of Russia’ with British assistance. In
April 1880 the bottom fell out of this policy. The British Liberal party,
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under Gladstone's leadership, defeated the Conservatives at the general
election. Gladstone hoped to inaugurate a new age in international rela-
tions, based on the Concert of Europe instead of individual action. He
succeeded only in negation. He abandoned Salisbury’s Turkish policy;
withdrew the military consuls from Asia Minor; and disregarded the
guarantee to Turkey, though he did not return Cyprus, which had been its
quid pro quo. But the Concert of Europe never came to life. The statesmen
of Europe, apart from Gladstone, lacked a common conscience. They
relied on the balance of power and thought only of their national interests.
Still, Gladstone’s acts left the Austrians high and dry. They were driven
into the League of the Three Emperors, for lack of anything better.
The new League took another year to come into formal existence.
First, the Austrians resisted ; then the assassination of Alexander II pro-
voked further delays. The League was finally signed on 18 June 1881. Its
predecessor of eight years before had been a declaration of monarchical
solidarity; this was a practical bargain with nothing sentimental about it
except its name. The three emperors promised each other neutrality; they
also asserted ‘the European and mutually obligatory character’ of the rule
of the Straits — a double repudiation, in fact, of the policy of working with
Great Britain which Austria-Hungary had previously favoured. Germany
was freed from having to choose between Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Russia got security at the Straits, short of an isolated action by Great
Britain in defiance of all the continental powers. But where was the gain
for Austria-Hungary? The Austrians refused to trust Russia’s word and
grumbled ceaselessly at the position into which Bismarck had forced them.
He found an odd way of satisfying them. Italy had been beating about on
the fringe of great-power status ever since her unification in 1861. Her
quest for alliances was really a quest of recognition as an equal; and this
recognition had been rarely obtained. At the Congress of Berlin Italy had
ranked rather below Turkey and slightly above Greece. She had come
away empty-handed ; and in angry resentment ran after predominance in
Tunis. This provoked French competition. The French would have much
rather left Tunis alone; but they could not tolerate an Italian outpost on
the frontier of Algeria. On 12 May 1881 Tunis became a French pro-
tectorate.
The Italians were more humiliated than ever; and the monarchy itself
seemed threatened. The house of Savoy, once the ally of revolution, now
sought conservative respectability. In October 1881 King Humbert went
on a begging mission to Vienna. The Austrians refused his proposal for a
mutual guarantee. Early in 1882 the Italians had a stroke of luck. There
was a short-lived revival of Pan-Slav feeling in Russia. Bismarck feared
that Russia might not remain faithful to the League of the Three
Emperors. He took up the negotiations with Italy as a precautionary
measure. The outcome was the Triple Alliance, concluded on 20 May
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1882. The only clause of practical importance in this was Italy’s promise
to remain neutral in a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary, hence
freeing four Austro-Hungarian army corps for the front in Galicia. The
Austrians got this benefit for nothing. Germany paid the price by agreeing
to defend Italy against France. This was on paper a considerable liability
for Germany, though less — in Bismarck’s eyes — than the alternative of
supporting Austro-Hungarian expansion in the Balkans. In any case, he
always assumed, in true Napoleonic fashion, that whatever he wanted to
do he would succeed in doing. He would somehow keep the peace between
France and Italy; and thus never be called on to discharge his liability.
Bismarck’s calculation proved correct. Triple Alliance and Emperors’
League between them so tied up the European powers that none could
move without his permission; and this was always withheld. Changes
took place only outside Europe, the greatest of them in Egypt. Here
Great Britain and France had been wrestling for years, in an uneasy
condominium, with the chaotic finances of a spendthrift khedive. In 1882
nationalist disturbances broke out against the Europeans in Egypt. Joint
intervention was planned. At the last moment the French government
drew back, because of opposition in the Chamber. The British intervened
alone; and in September 1882 established a protectorate over Egypt (at
first unavowed) which was to last for seventy years. This was a great event ;
indeed the only real event in international relations between the battle of
Sedan and the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. All the rest
were manoeuvres which left the combatants at the close of day exactly
where they had started. The British occupation of Egypt altered the
balance of power. It not only gave the British security for their route to
India; it made them masters of the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Middle East; it made it unnecessary for them to stand in the front line
against Russia at the Straits — ultimately indeed unnecessary to stand
against her at all. It also, as a more temporary though still important
consequence, disrupted the ‘liberal alliance’ between Great Britain and
France; and thus prepared the way for the Franco-Russian Alliance ten
years later.
This however was not the immediate consequence. Instead Bismarck,
playing on the French resentment over Egypt, attempted to round off his
‘system’ by a reconciliation between France and Germany. In the long
run the attempt came to nothing; and it is therefore impossible to decide
how seriously the attempt was taken by either party — the failures in
history have no memorial. Certainly there were reserves on both sides.
The French, because of Alsace and Lorraine, could never follow Bis-
marck’s prompting ‘to forgive Sedan as after 1815 they came to forgive
Waterloo’. Nor would Germany’s partners in the Triple Alliance turn
wholeheartedly against Great Britain, whose support they might one day
need — the Austrians against Russia, the Italians against France. More-
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over the colonial disputes which blew up in Africa between France and
Germany on the one side, and Great Britain on the other, have led most
historians to suppose that the Franco-German co-operation was an acci-
dental product of these disputes, not the other way round. This was
probably true so far as France was concerned ; but Bismarck, as he him-
self said, was never ‘a man for colonies ’, and his sudden claim for African
colonies seems to fall into place as a move in his European policy — not,
of course, that he repudiated the popularity which these claims brought
him in Germany.
At any rate, the result is beyond doubt, whatever the cause. Not only
was Great Britain isolated — this was her own choice — but her two prin-
cipal rivals for empire, France and Russia, were for once unhampered by
anxieties for their European security; and, more than that, could often
count on backing from the other powers. This backing was of a limited
kind. No power, except possibly Russia, ever seriously contemplated war
against Great Britain. The great disputes which raged from Egypt to the
Far East were fought in diplomatic terms, with loans, notes, and railway
concessions as the instruments. Armed power receded into the back-
ground, an ultimate sanction that was almost forgotten. Egypt illustrates
this. The British army controlled Egypt; the British navy dominated the
Mediterranean. The British could have annexed Egypt at a moment’s
notice; and the French could have done nothing to stop them. But the
British claimed to administer Egypt in the interests of the bondholders;
and the Egyptian question was disputed at the caisse de la dette, not
between armies and navies. As a result international relations ran on two
levels. On one were the formal alliances, which gave promises of support
in some hypothetical war which never happened; on the other were the
combinations of bankers and committees. On the first level Great Britain
was the most isolated of the powers ; on the second, the most involved.
She had no alliances ; but, as the power with the most world-wide interests,
i nn umerable ententes and, of course, innumerable quarrels.
Even on this diplomatic plane, Great Britain had a rough time during
1884 and the early part of 1885. French and German colonial advances
against her ran together, for whatever reason. In July 1884 a conference
to settle the Egyptian question broke up without result. Bismarck held
out to the French the prospect of a maritime league directed against
England. To others he boasted that he had revived the continental system
of Napoleon I, though this time with Berlin as centre. The high point of
this continental solidarity came in September 1884 when the three
emperors met at Skiemiewice — the last such meeting ever to take place.
Later in the autumn an international conference met at Berlin to settle
the affairs of central Africa, and particularly of the Congo basin. Again
the Franco-German partnership against Great Britain was displayed, in
principle if not in achievement. The Berlin Act was a great stroke in
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international affairs. It laid down the rules for ‘effective occupation’ of
uncivilised lands; and so ensured that the partition of Africa should take
place without armed conflict between the powers. The Berlin conference
has another incidental point of interest ; it was the last international con-
ference on any concrete subject for more than twenty years — telling evi-
dence indeed that the Concert of Europe was dissolved. Each power
served the common good by pursuing its individual aims, and peace
seemed secure without any conscious effort.
The worst moment of British isolation came in April 1885. On
30 March a Russian force defeated the Afghans at Pendjeh on their
northern frontier; and so seemed to threaten Afghanistan, India’s buffer-
state. The British, lacking allies, could rely only on force; and on 21 April
the pacific Gladstone secured a vote of credit from the House of Com-
mons as the preliminary to war. The British planned to operate Salisbury’s
doctrine of 1878 and to send an expeditionary force through the Straits.
Bismarck’s system worked, as he had intended, for Russia’s protection.
Every great power — not only Germany and Austria-Hungary but France
and Italy also — warned the sultan to keep the Straits closed against the
British. It was the most formidable display of continental solidarity on an
anti-British basis between Napoleon I’s time and Hitler’s. Its very success
dissolved it. The Russians had felt insecure at the Straits and had there-
fore sought in Afghanistan a counter-threat against the British. Once
convinced that the Straits would remain closed, they lost interest in
Penjdeh and agreed to send the dispute to arbitration — quite a score in its
way for Gladstone’s high principles. Afghanistan remained a buffer-state,
as it is to this day : one of the few countries that has always preserved its
independence from the competing great powers.
The peaceful outcome of the Penjdeh affair was not the only improve-
ment for the British. The Franco-German entente gradually crumbled
during the summer of 1885, rather from a French revulsion against
colonial expansion than from a pronounced hostility towards Germany.
Moreover the Eastern Question caught fire again in September; and
Bismarck had to treat the British with more consideration for the sake of
Austria-Hungary. The new Eastern crisis centred, like its predecessor, on
Bulgaria. But the positions were now reversed. In 1878 Russia had set up
a Big Bulgaria which Great Britain and Austria-Hungary insisted on
dismembering. In 1885 two out of the three parts of Bulgaria came
together — eastern Roumelia joined the existing principality. Russia
sought to dismember Bulgaria or, at the very least, to force it back into
subordination. Austria-Hungary and Great Britain defended Bulgaria’s
unity and independence. The crisis lasted in various forms from September
1885 until March 1888. First, Russia tried to undo the unification that
had taken place; next to impose a Russian general as governor; finally to
prevent the election of an anti-Russian prince. All these moves failed.
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The Russians received a barren satisfaction in March 1888 when the
sultan, theoretical overlord of Bulgaria, declared the election of Ferdinand
of Coburg illegal. But nothing happened. The crisis died away without
war.
In retrospect it is tempting to say that nothing vital was at stake.
Though it was no doubt humiliating to Russia that Bulgaria had repudi-
ated her patronage, there was no fundamental change in the Near
Eastern situation. Was it really worth Russia’s while to fight a great war
merely for the pleasure of appointing the prince of Bulgaria? In any case,
Russia had not the strength to fight a great war even if she wished to do so.
All this was less obvious to contemporaries; and the Bulgarian crisis
caused an upheaval in international affairs. The League of the Three
Emperors was an immediate casualty. The Austrians were determined to
resist Russia, despite Bismarck’s promptings to the opposite course; and
they called for German support. Bismarck referred them to London,
where Salisbury, once more in power, was equally reluctant. The two
competed in reserves and evasions : both anxious to avoid war or even
commitment, both doubtful— in the last resort — whether war was really
imminent. Bismarck had a stroke of luck during 1886 when there was a
febrile revival of nationalism in France under the nominal leadership of
General Boulanger. Bismarck could make out that Germany was too
menaced by France to have any forces to spare for the support of Austria-
Hungary. This was an adroit and unanswerable excuse. In Bismarck’s
own words: ‘I could not invent Boulanger, but he happened very con-
veniently for me. ’ Salisbury, though caring little about Bulgaria, dared
not altogether estrange Austria-Hungary and Italy because of the Egyp-
tian question. The result was the first Mediterranean agreement of March
1887 by which Great Britain, Austria-Hungary and Italy promised each
other diplomatic support — certainly a gain for Austria-Hungary so far as
Bulgaria was concerned, but more immediately an end of the isolation
over Egypt with which the British had previously been threatened.
The competition between Bismarck and Salisbury was not yet resolved.
The British promise of diplomatic co-operation was almost as non-
committal as any promise could be; and Bismarck was himself somewhat
compromised by having to agree to the renewal of the Triple Alliance.
Both men sought to recover their freedom. Salisbury tried to settle the
Egyptian question; and he actually concluded a convention with the
sultan (Egypt’s nominal overlord) for British withdrawal on conditions.
Then Russian and French protests frightened the sultan; and he withdrew
his consent. It is easy to understand Russian objections. But the principal
French motive was to secure Russian backing in Egypt; yet this would
have been unnecessary to them if the British had withdrawn. Such are the
confusions of international policy. At all events, the failure of the conven-
tion had decisive effects. Salisbury was pushed farther on the path of
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co-operation with Austria-Hungary and Italy. The French had no alterna-
tive to Russia’s friendship ; and the Franco-Russian Alliance was now only
a matter of time.
Bismarck did better. He rescued the Russians from isolation in the
Near East at little cost to himself. On 18 June, when the League of the
Three Emperors technically expired, he concluded with the Russians a
new agreement — the Reinsurance Treaty. This renewed the promise of
neutrality with two significant exceptions : it would not apply in case of
a Russian attack on Austria-Hungary, nor in case of a German attack on
France. Neither signatory projected such an attack; and these two
reserves had always existed by implication. The other part of the treaty
had more practical application : Germany would give Russia diplomatic
support in Bulgaria and at the Straits. Russia was still in a minority, but
at least she was not alone ; and this moral satisfaction perhaps helped to
keep her on the peaceful track. The Reinsurance Treaty contained nothing
new. It merely formalised policies which Bismarck, and for that matter
the Russians, had defined again and again. Its terms would not have
surprised or offended the other powers, if they had become known; but
they would have outraged German opinion. It was for this reason that
Bismarck kept it secret : he was conducting a policy which ran counter to
German sentiment. Germany had no conflict of interest with Russia; yet
German feeling was more antagonistic towards her than to any other
power. Most Germans wished to be ‘western’ and liberal; while the
threat of cheap Russian grain estranged the Junker landowners who had
been the one pro-Russian group. Moreover, Russia was the one conti-
nental power which remained obstinately independent even at her moments
of greatest weakness; and unconsciously the Germans resented this.
Bismarck knew how to moderate his mastery; other Germans were less
controlled.
Bismarck got his way for the time being. The autumn of 1887 saw the
Bulgarian crisis apparently at its height. Bismarck’s reserve once more
forced Salisbury’s hand; and in December Austria-Hungary, Great
Britain, and Italy concluded the second Mediterranean agreement. This
went beyond diplomatic co-operation and envisaged common action
against any ‘illegal enterprise’ in the Near East. It was more nearly an
alliance with other powers than any agreement that Great Britain had
made in peacetime, certainly more binding than the ententes made with
France and Russia twenty years later. But nothing dramatic happened.
The Russians did not attempt any ‘illegal enterprise’; and the crisis died
away. This peaceful outcome was the greatest success ever achieved by the
balance of power; but perhaps it was the general wish for peace which
made the balance of power work.
Bismarck would, no doubt, have liked to make his ‘system’ perma-
nent — Russia checked by the three ‘ Mediterranean’ powers, yet appeased
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by the Reinsurance Treaty, and France thus safely isolated ; and in fact the
system ran on until his fall, over domestic issues, in March 1 890. Then a
general shake-up seemed to follow. Bismarck’s successors, the men of
‘the new course’, were impatient with his complicated pattern of checks
and balances. Far from recognising that German reserve pushed Great
Britain forward, they believed that she would become a full member of the
Triple Alliance if Germany too backed Austria-Hungary without restric-
tions. They therefore refused to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, and
promised to back Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. They sought British
favour by renouncing any German attempt to reach the head-waters of the
Nile. In their zest for resolute action, they even promised to back Italian
ambitions in Tripoli against the French. Things worked out just as
Bismarck had expected. The British, far from being tempted into the
Triple Alliance, were delighted to see the Germans shouldering their
responsibilities and withdrew towards isolation. The Balkans were fortu-
nately quiet; and the German promises to Austria-Hungary therefore had
no practical result. But the Italians boasted of their strong diplomatic
position; and this alarmed the French. Reluctantly they turned to Russia
for support and alliance.
Reluctance was indeed the keyword of the Franco-Russian Alliance on
both sides. Not only were republic and despotic monarchy antipathetic;
neither had the slightest sympathy with the other’s practical concern.
Russia had no desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine for France; and France,
on her side, was — of all the powers — the most anxious to maintain the
independence of Turkey. Their only common interest was security from
any German threat, so that each could pursue aims elsewhere. But here
again there was no coincidence of policy. Though each was the rival of
Great Britain, the rivalries did not overlap. France wanted to get the
British out of Egypt; the Russians wanted the Egyptian conflict to con-
tinue, so that France and Great Britain should remain estranged. Russia’s
ambitions centred on north China, where the French had nothing to gain.
The Russians had no serious resentment against Germany, despite the
failure to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, and thought of the alliance as a
general anti-British combination all over the world. The French hoped
ultimately to be reconciled with Great Britain, so as to strengthen their
position against Germany.
There was conflict even over the military objectives of the two prospec-
tive allies. The French wanted to ensure that a considerable part of the
Russian army would march against Germany in the event of a general war;
the Russians wanted to defeat Austria-Hungary, and were inclined to
think that even a German capture of Paris would not be a disaster if they
themselves took Budapest and Vienna. Not surprisingly, therefore, the
negotiations took long to reach a conclusion: first a general entente in
August 1891; then a military convention in August 1892; and finally
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confirmation of this convention by the political heads in January 1894.
The French President was allowed to refer to ‘the alliance’ only in 1895;
and the tsar waited until 1897 before acknowledging it in public. Techni-
cally the Franco-Russian Alliance was never more than a pledge for
common action in case of a war against Germany. This made it impossible
for Germany to threaten first one, then the other, and so forced on her the
peace which she had kept willingly in Bismarck’s time. Ostensibly the
alliance was a great defeat for Bismarck’s successors. Its practical result
was to restore his system in a different form. His overriding object had
been to prevent a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Now the
French, being committed to support Russia, had the same object. The
Balkan conflict was dying away in any case; the influence of both France
and Germany accelerated the process. The new balance of power offered
only the choice between general war and general peace; and all the
continental powers chose peace for many years to come. Triple Alliance
and Franco-Russian Alliance alike became defensive combinations; and
any power that was tempted towards adventure was restrained as much
by its allies as by its opponents.
This restraint applied only in Europe; and the very security there made
it easier for the European powers to pursue ‘ imperialist ’ aims elsewhere.
The European stalemate and the expansion outside Europe were two
different aspects of the same situation: each produced the other. The loser
was Great Britain with her world-wide interests; and the Franco-Russian
Alliance began the period of true British ‘isolation’. Previously the
British had assumed that others were more in need of help than they were.
As Salisbury said: ‘Great Britain does not solicit alliances; she grants
them.’ Now however a continental power would endanger its security,
instead of increasing it, by an alliance with Great Britain. The British had
assumed, too, that their overseas rivals — particularly France and Russia —
would always be distracted by anxiety for their European frontiers. Now
these frontiers were secure. France challenged the British in West Africa
and Egypt; Russia moved ruthlessly forward in the Far East; and the
Germans too entered the imperialist competition. Yet this competition
had an unavowed limit. All the European powers had chosen peace in
continental affairs ; therefore they would make imperialist gains, too, only
so long as these could be achieved peacefully. If the French would not
fight for Alsace and Lorraine, how much less would they fight for Egypt or
Siam? And similarly with the others. The British were the one exception :
having nothing to lose (or gain) in Europe, they were prepared to fight for
their imperial position and, with the steady expansion of the British fleet,
could fight successfully. Isolation began as an embarrassment; later,
freedom from European commitments left the British untrammelled else-
where.
The new balance of power took some little time to display its effects. It
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seemed at first that the Near East might again become a centre of conflict,
particularly when the Armenian massacres of 1894 and 1895 raised new
demands for the reform, or for the partition, of the Turkish empire. The
Russians supposed that they had improved their position in the Near East
by making an alliance with France. So they had, but only in a negative
way. That alliance certainly made it impossible for the British to act on
the old assumption of the Mediterranean agreement, that France would
remain neutral while the British resisted Russia at Constantinople. Now
that France was Russia’s ally, the British dared not pass the Straits with a
potentially hostile French fleet behind them. The British proposed that
Germany should impose neutrality on France. This, in its turn, asked too
much; for a German threat to France would bring her Russian ally into
action. Germany and Great Britain demanded the impossible of each
other. The British threatened to withdraw into isolation; the Germans
answered by threatening Great Britain, as Bismarck had done, with a
continental league.
The British threat was the more effective of the two. The Straits ceased
to be important to them as their control of Egypt hardened; and in
November 1895 the British fleet finally withdrew from Aegean waters.
A month later, the Germans used the excuse of the Jameson raid to
demonstrate their support of the Boer republics by a patronising telegram
to President Kruger; and implied that German, Russian, and French
challenges to the British empire would be knit together. This was empty
show. Bismarck had no ambitions outside Europe and no objections to
those of France or Russia; his continental league therefore had perhaps
some sense. Now the Germans expected support from France and Russia
without allowing them much gain in return. Yet the two were not even
supporting each other in their imperial enterprises ; how much less would
they support Germany? Besides, the British navy was now a more formid-
able force than it had been ten years before; and the British answered the
Kruger telegram by setting up a ‘flying squadron’ to show that they could
take on all comers.
Yet just at this moment, when Germany and Great Britain had reached
deadlock, the Russian danger at the Straits — so far as it had ever existed —
was dispelled; not by Austria-Hungary or Great Britain, but by France.
The French had tried to avoid this ; but, failing anyone else, they had to
act. For, just as Russia offered France security on the basis of the Treaty
of Frankfurt, so the French offered Russia security within the framework
of the Treaty of Berlin. When the Russians talked in December 1895 of
seizing Constantinople, the French replied: ‘only if the question of Alsace
and Lorraine is opened as well ’. This price was too high for the Russians
to pay. Moreover, their concern for the Straits was essentially defensive;
and, as it gradually became clear to them that the British had abandoned
any idea of passing the Straits, the Russians too were prepared to leave
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well alone. The Austrians would still have liked to follow an anti-Russian
course; but, failing support from Germany or Great Britain, they also had
no choice. In May 1897 the League of the Three Emperors was renewed
in weaker form. Russia and Austria-Hungary agreed to freeze the Near
East; and ‘on ice’ it remained for the next ten years. Every European
question had thus reached a temporary stability, so much so that even in
the early days of 1914 one good judge held that the existing states and
frontiers were fixed ‘for ever’.
Every great power behaved as though it enjoyed the geographic security
which had enabled the British to build their empire in ‘splendid isolation’.
This had another curious consequence. The opinion long held by English
radicals, on an isolationist basis, that foreign policy was unnecessary and
wars caused by the wickedness of the governing class, spread to continental
countries. In earlier times revolutionary socialists, for instance, had con-
demned the existing international order and had denounced Mettemich
or Tsar Nicholas I as peace-mongers, upholding an unjust status quo. The
new socialist international, revived in 1 889, taught that the working classes
had no country and proposed to organise a general strike against war,
assuming that any war could have only a selfish ‘ governing-class ’ motive.
Even the governing class had twinges of conscience against war; and the
first Hague conference, held in 1899, aired projects of international dis-
armament, though the only practical outcome was the Hague court on a
voluntary basis. This court could only settle casual disputes. It could not
handle such questions as Poland or the future of the Ottoman or Habs-
burg empires; and the creation of the Hague court was, in fact, evidence
that men had forgotten the existence of such questions.
The delusive stalemate in Europe opened the short-lived era of ‘world-
policy’. Men supposed that the powers had abandoned their disputes in
Europe because the prizes elsewhere were so much greater, whereas the
truth was the other way round. The powers had dropped their disputes in
Europe because they were too hot to handle. Russia and France had
always tried to combine Europe and empire. Germany was the new
entrant into the field. Her economic strength now put her in the front
rank of the powers, ahead of any except Great Britain and the United
States. It seemed reasonable that like them she should become a world-
power. But there was also a political cause for this development. Bis-
marck had held that Germany’s central position in Europe debarred her
from expansion overseas. He said to an enthusiast for expansion in
Africa: ‘Here is France; and here is Russia. That is my map of Africa.’
His successors assumed that the danger from France and Russia had
ceased to exist. Indeed, these two powers were regarded as a positive
advantage by Germany. For, given their fierce competition with the
British, Germany could safely pursue world-aims without arousing
British, or for that matter Franco-Russian, hostility. Where Germany had
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once been the pivot in a system of alliance, she now became the exponent
of ‘the free hand’; rejoicing at the conflicts of others, and collecting
rewards from both sides.
The calculation was correct. Germany never had colonial disputes with
France. Her project for a railway to Baghdad was less of a menace to
Russia than was the world-wide opposition from Great Britain. Most of
all, Germany was a lesser danger to the British empire than was France or
Russia, at any rate until the plans for a great German navy came to
fruition — and realisation of that had to wait until 1909. Though there
were colonial disputes between Germany and Great Britain — over a
hypothetical partition of the Portuguese colonies and over Samoa — these
were relatively trivial; and all were easily settled, even without the fraudu-
lent hope held out by the Germans that they might, if appeased, become
Great Britain’s ally.
The decisive centre of conflict in the era of world-policy was the Far
East. Here too, as in the Near East, a decrepit empire was breaking up
under European penetration. Unlike the Near East, however, there was
no question of security — no Russian fear for the Black Sea or British
anxiety for the route to India. The sole prize was trade, or rather the
expectation of trade with a vast hypothetical China market which, in fact,
never became real. The British had long held a near-monopoly of what
trade there was ; but they had no grave objection to sharing this trade with
others so long as these others maintained the open door. Hence they did
not complain seriously when the Germans entered the Far East by seizing
Kiao-Chow in 1897; and they were positively delighted when the United
States, in a short burst of imperialism, conquered the Philippines from
Spain in 1898. British antagonism was against Russia; for the Russians,
being weaker economically, used their military power to close the Chinese
door, not to open it.
The Far East was a tougher problem for the British than the Near East
had been. Sea-power was less effective, and allies harder to find. The
Russians could approach northern China by land; and, with the French in
Indo-China, the British could risk their fleet in the China seas even less
than at Constantinople. Even worse, there seemed no Far Eastern equiva-
lent of Austria-Hungary: no power whose need to resist Russia was as
great as the British. In the early days of 1 898 there was an alarm that the
partition of China had begun ; and the Russians indeed acquired a long
lease of Port Arthur, dominating the Yellow Sea. The British beat about
for allies. They tried Japan, who had herself staked out an abortive claim
to Port Arthur in 1895; they tried the United States. Both evaded en-
tanglement. Most of all the British tried Germany, proposing an alliance
which would call a halt to Russian expansion. The proposal was plausible
from the British point of view. Great Britain and Germany were modem
industrial powers. Both wanted to preserve the Chinese empire and the
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open door. The scheme broke on the fact, so easily ignored, that Ger-
many — unlike Great Britain — was still in Europe. A Far Eastern war
would be for the British a war in the Far East; for the Germans it would
be a continental war for survival. This price was too high to pay for the
China market. The Germans had to stand aside, and consoled themselves
that they were bound to gain from the inevitable war between Great
Britain and Russia.
The British were forced back on their own resources. Since they could
not resist Russia, they played for time; and of this the Russians were
always generous. As usual, the Russians planned more ambitiously than
they performed. They were short of money; their railway across Siberia
was not completed; their energy was exhausted once they had acquired
Port Arthur. Meanwhile, the British improved their position elsewhere.
In 1896 they had begun the reconquest of the Sudan. In September 1898
they destroyed the dervish army at Omdurman. At almost the same
moment a French expedition under Marchand arrived at Fashoda, farther
up the Nile. It arrived two years late. The expedition had been designed as
a move in diplomacy. Its object was to reopen the Egyptian question and
to bring the British to the conference table. Once the British army
advanced up the Nile, diplomacy ended; armed strength took its place.
The British refused to negotiate. They demanded Marchand’s uncondi-
tional withdrawal. The French had no choice but surrender. The British
army could destroy Marchand’s tiny force; the British navy controlled the
Mediterranean. Neither Germany nor Russia would aid France. Fashoda
was a triumph for ‘splendid isolation’. The British established their
domination of the Nile valley entirely by their own strength — indeed with
allies they would have had to share. Moreover Fashoda made British
isolation still more secure. The British no longer needed the votes of
associates now that their hold over Egypt rested on military strength; and
the British navy at Alexandria could forget about the Straits.
British self-confidence was at its height, and overreached itself. The
British, having routed the French on the Nile without war, thought that
they could do the same with the Boers in South Africa; and the triumph of
Fashoda led straight to the outbreak of the Boer War a year later. This
turned out to be a tougher affair than the British had expected; and the
war absorbed all their resources for three years instead of finding them in
Pretoria by Christmas. Yet the Boer War too displayed the virtues of
splendid isolation. All the continental powers sympathised with a small
nation struggling rightly to be free, as powers usually do when the small
nation is not struggling against themselves. All of them would have liked
to humiliate Great Britain, and to exploit her embarrassment. Yet the
talk of a continental league came to nothing. The underlying European
conflicts reasserted themselves. The Russians proposed mediation in the
Boer War by the powers. The French tactfully replied that they would
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agree to anything which the Germans agreed to. The Germans, however,
would co-operate only if the powers ‘ mutually guaranteed their European
possessions for a long period of years ’ — in other words, a French renun-
ciation of Alsace and Lorraine, but (given the restriction to Europe) no
backing for Russia in the Far East. The negotiations collapsed. In any
case, they were futile. The British navy dominated the seas — so much so
that the entire army could be sent to South Africa without any fear that
the British Isles would be invaded. If all the armies of Europe had
mobilised, not a single soldier would have reached the Boers.
The Far East continued to be Great Britain’s one weak spot ; and the
Boer War offered Russia the chance of easy success. The British were
saved unexpectedly by the Chinese themselves. The Boxer rising of June
1900 was the greatest repudiation of the West by a non-European civilisa-
tion since the Indian Mutiny. The legations at Peking were besieged, the
German minister killed. This humiliation forced Germany into the lead.
An international force was sent out under the German field-marshal
Waldersee : the only time in history when troops of all the great European
powers served under a single commander. Intelligent observers had some
excuse when they expected that European unity would be achieved in a
‘consortium’ for the exploitation of China. Of more practical import-
ance, the Germans concluded with Great Britain an agreement (16 Octo-
ber 1900) to maintain the integrity of the Chinese empire. The Germans
were only concerned to prevent the British grabbing a ‘sphere’ for them-
selves; the British, however, thought that the agreement could be turned
against Russia. For a few months, the British seemed to have turned the
comer and to have manufactured a Far Eastern equivalent for the
Mediterranean Agreements.
The Anglo-German agreement was however a bluff against Russia and
the bluff was soon called. The Japanese were eager to resist further
Russian expansion; but, if they were to fight a war overseas, they must be
secure from the French navy. In March 1901 they asked the British to
keep France neutral. The British were still at war in South Africa; they
had no ships to spare for the Far East, and passed the Japanese inquiry to
Germany. The Germans equivocated. They offered ‘ benevolent neutrality ’ ;
then explained that this meant ‘strict and correct neutrality’, no more.
The myth of Anglo-German co-operation in the Far East was exploded.
The British tried to resurrect it by offering to Germany a formal alliance;
but no offer could be high enough to involve Germany in a great Euro-
pean war. There was no formal estrangement between Great Britain and
Germany. Politicians in both countries continued to talk of the ‘ natural
alliance’ ; but after March 1901 it was clear that this alliance could not be
translated into effective action so long as France and Russia remained
independent powers.
The British continued to rely on time. The Japanese were less patient.
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They resolved to clear their position one way or the other: either a pact
with Russia to share the Far East and exclude all others, or an alliance
with Great Britain to keep France neutral. They opened both negotiations
in November 1901. The Russians were generous of words; they offered
nothing. Their only serious proposal was that Japan should be excluded
from the Far East like everyone else. The British were more forthcoming,
particularly when threatened with the alternative of a Russo-Japanese
combination. The war in South Africa was ending. The British had now
ships to spare for the Far East. On 30 January 1902 Japan and Great
Britain reached agreement on mutual aid if either were attacked in the
Far East by two powers. In practical terms, this meant that Japan could
stand up to Russia without fear of being taken in the rear by the French
navy. The alliance did not necessarily imply war with Russia. Indeed both
parties to it hoped that it would make compromise with Russia easier, now
that they could not be played off against each other.
Nor did the Anglo-Japanese agreement imply any British estrangement
from Germany. On the contrary, the British assumed relations would be
more cordial now that they did not have to plague the Germans with
requests for help. Indeed the alliance strengthened British isolation from
a European point of view. Previously they had often sought the help of
one member or other of the Triple Alliance against the Franco-Russian
Alliance, though always in vain. Now they could rejoice, like every other
power, that the two alliances cancelled out. Yet, against all expectations,
the Anglo-Japanese agreement ultimately turned international relations
upside down. Not only did it eliminate the inevitable war between Great
Britain and Russia on which the Germans had counted. Assisted by
fantastic Russian blunders, it led to a great war in the Far East which
shook the balance of power in Europe and so ended the deadlock which
had given Europe a peace of unparalleled duration.
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CHAPTER XXI
RIVALRIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN,
THE MIDDLE EAST, AND EGYPT
B y 1870 it was plain that in the great area, at once a crossroads and a
frontier, which is bounded by the waters of the Mediterranean, of
the Red Sea, of the Arabian and Indian Oceans, of the Persian Gulf,
and by those of the Caspian and the Black Seas, the influence of the
European powers was becoming ever more widely extended.
The capitals of St Petersburg, Paris, and London, rather than those of
Constantinople, Cairo, or Teheran, had of course long been the centres
wherein Near and Middle Eastern policies were decided. 1 If something
unforeseen, something spontaneous and native to the area, actually hap-
pened, then steps had at once to be taken in those centres to bring the
consequences of any such ‘untoward events’ under control. One concert
of Europe had, in 1840-1, curbed one such disturber of the Levantine
peace, the ambitious Mehemet Ali of Egypt. Another concert had, in
1854-6, taken the measure of a more formidable innovator, someone who
was not supposed to be a native of the area at all — Tsar Nicholas I of
Russia. In 1856, too, the British had sent gunboats into the Persian Gulf
to stop the Shah of Persia from absconding with his Afghan neighbour’s
property of Herat. The existence of peculiar ‘spheres of interest’ was
mutually recognised by the powers: it was their expansion that was
objected to. No one went to the assistance of the Circassian leader
Shamil in the Caucasus, or to that of Sher Ali in Kabul, of the Bey in
Tunis, or of Ahmed Arabi in Egypt, although there have been causes
worse. Everyone admitted the plight of the Armenians in Turkey: no one
did anything to relieve it. It was not this but a later generation of British
officials that adjudged the Hashemites of the Hejaz worthy of support
against their overlords. Revolt, or even innovation, anywhere along the
route to the East was a danger to all the European powers whose interests
anywhere abutted on that route. There were always better strategic argu-
ments for maintaining the status quo than for change.
Whether in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century this would
continue to be so, was the question now set. Whether the Middle East
would continue to be merely a chequerboard for the exercise of European
1 The term ‘Middle East’ is an anachronism throughout. Although Valentine Chirol
published his Middle Eastern Question in 1903, the term was not commonly used in
England until after 1917. It apparently originated as a Service designation with the staff
of General Maude, commanding in Mesopotamia. It is still used confusedly. American
writers in particular often prefer the older term ‘Near East’, or, when they do use ‘ Middle
East’, include India in it. The still older term, ‘the Levant’, deserves rehabilitation.
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diplomacy, or whether it was to become an actual theatre of military
operation for European soldiers, was the problem that this generation of
statesmen had to decide. A like puzzle faced them simultaneously in
Africa. It says much both for the statesmen and for the temperate climate
of the public opinion in which they did their work that, although Europe
irrupted at will into the two great continents of Asia and Africa, neither a
Middle Eastern nor an African dispute was taken by any power as the
pretext for breaking the peace.
Of all the powers, it was Great Britain to whom the stability of the
Middle East was of greatest importance. The British attitude reflected that
of Lord Palmerston, who, having noted Mehemet Ah’s control of Crete
and his imperialism in Greece and Syria as portents, always believed that
the Turk was a better occupier of the road to India than an active Arab
sovereign would be. Although later Foreign Secretaries disliked the neces-
sity of keeping intact this ramshackle structure of a barbarous Ottoman
empire, none of them altered course; not until, in 1914, catastrophe
occurred and the sultan threw in his lot with an enemy coalition, did the
British finally bring themselves to take over the freehold of his dis-
membered domain.
Palmerston had fought dour battles against the construction both of a
canal at the Suez isthmus under French auspices and of a railway leading
from a Levantine sally-port down the valley of the Euphrates under
British auspices, on the single ground that it was not in the interests of
England that the Levant should be disturbed by the revolutionary tech-
nology of the civilised powers. A canal at Suez, he told Stratford Canning
in 1851, must change, and not for the better, ‘the relative position of some
of the maritime powers of Europe towards each other’. A railway through
Mesopotamia would require the prop of a government guarantee, and
must inevitably involve interference with Turkish internal administration.
He lost his battle over Suez, and won it over the Euphrates — leaving it to
the Germans to take up the scheme, thirty years away ; but he had a point of
which his successors felt the sting. Although Lord Salisbury by 1896 looked
on the defence of Constantinople as an ‘antiquated standpoint’, and was
wishing that England had listened to Tsar Nicholas I in 1853, when the
tsar had had that thoughtful conversation with Sir Hamilton Seymour on
how best to partition the Ottoman empire in a spirit of mutual accord —
England taking Egypt, for instance — the Palmerstonian tradition was too
strongly entrenched. In that tradition, Russia was the power always to be
watched ; a rogue power, a comet power, the only one free enough of the
European state-system to be able to envisage its overthrow. The Russo-
phobia of the British public was the more acute because of this very
solitariness, this splendidly sinister isolation of the potential foe.
To the British, Middle Eastern policy was a matter of communication.
England had an empire in India and the Far East : it was essential to be
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THE MEDITERRANEAN, THE MIDDLE EAST, AND EGYPT
able to reach it. Essential, too, to have speedy news of it, for in 1857 forty
days had elapsed before the Court of Directors of the East India Company
heard of the mutiny at Meerut. It was essential, therefore, to control the
foreign policies of the countries that bordered the direct route to India —
although this might indeed be the ‘monstrous claim’ that Gladstone
characterised it to be in the Midlothian election campaign in 1880. In some
places the claim was easily asserted. England, the dominant sea-power,
was the immediate neighbour of every country that had a coastline, and
the direct route to the East was well supplied with coastlines. Countries
so endowed might be left to their own internal management, disgraceful
by civilised standards though this might be, as they had no power, if it
came to a crisis, to resist persuasion by the British navy. Elsewhere
complication loomed. The Straits of the Dardanelles and the brand-new
Suez Canal (1869) were dangerous bottlenecks, while countries impene-
trable by the British navy presented even worse difficulties. Persia indeed
had its southern Gulf, where all the trucial sheikhs could be brought into
line, but it was not possible to command policy in the distant northern
capital of Teheran from Mohammerah or the Karan. Afghanistan was
locked away amid mountain fastnesses, and who could know what
went on there? These countries, too, were ‘inns on the way’ to India.
Might it become necessary to own them? Or, at least, to put in reliable
tenants? But how was one to judge the reliability of an oriental magnate?
Amirs at Kabul, the Shah at Teheran, were to exploit these British
dubieties in a fashion that was never open to the sultan of a far greater
state at Constantinople.
In a dispatch of 6 May 1877 Derby as British Foreign Secretary
reviewed for the Russians’ benefit British interests in the East. These
included the continuing inviolability of the Straits, of Constantinople, of
the Suez Canal and of the Persian Gulf. In contrast, it is not at all clear
that the Russians ever worked out a consistent attitude towards their own
Eastern policy. They were certainly determined that no strong power
should be allowed to control the Straits, and 1870 saw Russia dispensing
with the hampering ‘ Black Sea clauses ’ of the Treaty of Paris of 1 856. But,
although the Russian story between the fall of Tchemkend (1864) and the
battle of Tshushima (1904) is one of expansion, it lacks a common-sense
basis. Defeated in the Crimea, Russia turned away from Europe to Asia
to appease her military amour-propre, but none of the social and economic
problems that beset the tsardom were ever to be solved in Turkestan.
The Russian foreign office hoped to use Central Asian conquests as a lever
with which to offset and deflect objectionable British policies in the
Balkans and in Asia Minor. But the relations between St Petersburg on
the one hand, and Tiflis and Tashkent on the other, where ambitious
governors-general sat spinning schemes of their own, were always tenuous
if not hostile; and the blank ignorance of St Petersburg, when charged by
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an indignant Whitehall with duplicity over an advance in central Asia,
was often genuine.
To an outside eye, the very inefficiency of the Russian bureaucracy
invested Russian policy with a mysterious menace. In 1889 Curzon in his
book Russia in Central Asia put the matter more succinctly than ever
Gorchakov or Giers managed to do: ‘To keep England quiet in Europe
by keeping her employed in Asia — that, briefly put, is the sum and sub-
stance of Russian policy.’ Yet Russian diplomatists could take the hint,
and were happy to capitalise on British unease. Nine years later, Witte at
St Petersburg was seeking to apply this doctrine to a broader area still.
‘He suggested’, Sir Nicolas O’Conor apprised his chief, ‘that instead of
thinking of a useless maritime combat, Russia should prepare to strike the
British Power in a vulnerable part. This could be effected by a railway from
Merv [in Turkestan] to Kushk [on the Afghan border], which would
enable Russia to attack Afghanistan in case of complications with
England in respect to the Chinese question.’ China or the Transvaal, by
then the particular issue hardly mattered : to immobilise British policy all
over the world, wrote Tsar Nicholas II at the time of the Boer War in
1899, he had only to telegraph the order for the mobilisation of the
Russian forces in Turkestan.
If, north-east of Suez, the Russian menace disquieted the British, west
and north of Suez the French irritant was to become ever more acute. In
1870 the French hold on Algeria was only recently consolidated, and the
Tunisian and Moroccan flanks lay open: British naval estimates could
safely stand at £9^ million. But the French line of communication now
lay directly athwart the British in the Mediterranean, and by 1888 France
had fifteen battleships in that sea to Britain’s eight. Next year the British
adopted their celebrated ‘Two-Power standard’, and by 1898 had added
a further twenty-nine battleships and twenty-six first-class cruisers to their
entire naval strength. None the less, by the 1890’s the French bases at
Toulon and at Bizerta in Tunisia together surpassed the British facilities
at Gibraltar and Malta. In the long run the British fleet could crush the
Toulon fleet, but in so doing it could leave itself no margin to frustrate a
Russian coup on Constantinople (which must, after the 1877-8 failure by
land, be expected by sea). Once the Franco-Russe was in being, from
1894 — a year when the combined French and Russian naval estimates
outstripped those of England, at £17^ million — British naval opinion was
firmly convinced that in time of war the Suez Canal would have to be
closed; and when the Black Sea had become a Russian lake with the
Straits as a safe outlet for the Russian fleet, Russian influence would
extend throughout Asia Minor and Syria, thus separating England from
India and the East by the distance of the Cape of Good Hope route. The
British squadron in the Aegean, symbol of a British naval preponderance
that no longer existed, was withdrawn in 1895.
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Facts of this kind combined to make it necessary, at long last, for the
dangerously extended British empire to get itself a European ally that owned
an army — necessary either to fight the French or to make friends with
them. Realising this, Salisbury after 1895 would have given the Russians
Constantinople itself, if he could have got the Triple Alliance to work
with him in a general partition of the Ottoman empire; agreement with
Russia, and par ricochet with France, was a matter both he and Joseph
Chamberlain long considered. British isolation in an imperialist age had
become perilous to every British policy.
In 1870, although the French, holding half of the Ottoman empire’s
public debt, were ubiquitous in the Levant, with a sphere of influence in
Syria and the Lebanon that seemed likely to expand, and with everything
in Egypt, including its khedive Ismail, geared to the power and attraction
of the franc, nothing of this future could be foreseen. Even had it been,
no British statesman would have opted for a firm French alliance.
Italy, in contrast, was not a great power, but its geographical position
made it a remarkably useful one. It was at once an anteroom to Bismarck’s
Europe and a springboard to the Levant. The key of the present situation
in Europe, Salisbury advised Rosebery when the latter succeeded him at
the Foreign Office in 1892, ‘is our position towards Italy and through
Italy to the Triple Alliance’. It was a notion derived from Disraeli, who
in March 1878, among other plans, had advocated constructing a Medi-
terranean League of Italy, France, Austria, and Germany, ‘to secure the
trade communications of Europe with the East from the overshadowing
influence of Russia’. Moreover, of all the European nations Italy was the
most vulnerable to a hostile fleet. Co-operation with England was thus a
cardinal article of faith with the Italians, who long recalled that it had
been Palmerston and Russell, standing as it were four-square on British
ships-of-the-line, who had obviated any possibility of European inter-
vention in the protracted processes of risorgimento. In pursuit of this
policy Italians had to swallow a pill or two. They saw, for example, their
Tunisian ambitions scotched by the French in 1881, since the French had
taken care to get British approval beforehand. On the other hand, the
Italians could take comfort from the Anglo-Italian ‘ Mediterranean agree-
ment’ (12 February 1887), and knew they could always rely on England,
who was determined to keep the French out of the Nile valley, to support
them on the Red Sea and in their ambitions in the north-east African
hinterland.
The Italian peninsula had its diplomatic parallel across the Adriatic.
Balkan turbulences could not become actively dangerous to the sea-
powers so long as there existed a friendly Italy on their flank and a friendly
Greece to their south. Only once in this period did a new factor emerge
in this area — but it was one that galvanised almost to convulsion British
policy in the Levant. The ‘Big Bulgaria’ which the Russians had imposed
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upon the defeated Turks by the Treaty of San Stefano (3 March 1878)
was given a coastline on the Aegean that would have by-passed those
Straits into the Marmara whose security so obsessed the British Admiralty.
San Stefano thus gave to Russia her first intoxicating draught of ‘warm
water’. It was indeed a great achievement for British foreign policy that
the subsequent Treaty of Berlin (13 July 1878), whatever else may be said
about it, disposed of ‘Big Bulgaria’ and locked its successor, ‘Eastern
Roumelia’, securely away from the southern sea.
The Russo-Turkish War, which ended with the Russian armies occu-
pying Turkish provinces south of the Caucasus, had set England a further
problem. It was part of that wider issue which had so troubled the British
government when fighting Russia in 1854: how was the whale to get to
effective grips with the bear? They had found eventual battleground in
the Crimea; but there had been a powerful school of thought, mustered by
‘Anglo-Indian’ strategists, which held that the chief aim of England’s
policy should have been the deliverance of the Caucasus from the
Russians. Indeed, when the English did in fact penetrate to the Sea of
Azov and occupied some coastal towns (May-June 1855), the Russians
had been greatly alarmed, and had determined to pin down the Anglo-
French invasion in the Crimea at all costs. In this they had succeeded.
Since then they had utterly subjugated the Circassians and built a great
military depot at Tiflis in Georgia. In 1877-8, when a second Anglo-
Russian encounter seemed inevitable, British war plans were still un-
co-ordinated. Disraeli could talk of sending the Indian army into
Turkestan on the one flank and throwing British troops into Tiflis on the
other; he could send the fleet up to Besika Bay twice over; and he could
summon seven thousand soldiers from India to Malta in April 1878 — but
just how this clarified the matter, and how these troops could be gainfully
employed if the occasion arose, was plain neither to Disraeli himself nor
to his admiring viceroy in India, Lytton, who lodged a mild protest
even as he sent the troops as requested. War was avoided: but the
Russians remained at Kars and Batum, casting their shadow far, and
causing Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria ‘ to turn their faces northwards ’.
Obviously England could not throw a competitive shadow across so great
an area from a base so distant as Malta. It was essential, therefore, to
obtain another watch-tower, or lighthouse, or place d'armes, close at hand,
in the Levant itself.
As early as October 1876 Salisbury had dispatched an agent, Colonel
Home, from Constantinople to look at possible ‘material guarantees’ of
future Turkish security: in other words, to find the likeliest place on
Turkish soil where the British might make themselves quickly available.
Home had examined the Gallipoli peninsula, in which Disraeli was
interested, but advised against it as it did not command ‘ the very country,
Syria and Mesopotamia, that it was requisite to retain control of’. He
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had gone on to inspect the islands of Mytilene, Lemnos, Crete, and
Rhodes in the Aegean, and ultimately Cyprus. Cyprus he considered the
best strategic site. It commanded the Turkish entry-port of Alexandretta,
and was only 66 miles from Syria. The others were, like Gallipoli, too
remote. Crete indeed had some advantages, but these were countered, in
Home’s opinion, by the existence in the island of a strong Enosis (union-
with-Greece) movement, which would give an alien governor a deal of
political trouble. Now, in 1878, Home’s report was brought out of its file.
Five days after San Stefano was signed the British cabinet adopted his
view of Cyprus, and while Disraeli’s plan of transferring troops from
India to the Mediterranean was under discussion, it was suggested that
these might be disembarked at Cyprus or at Alexandretta itself. In the
event, they came to Malta. At the Congress of Berlin, however, Salisbury
laid so much stress on the importance to the British empire of a new base
in the eastern Mediterranean that he made it clear to the sultan, prior to
the publication of the Cyprus convention (4 July 1878), that England was
prepared to occupy the island whether or not the sultan issued his permis-
sive firman. The conference was shocked, but not moved, by this piece of
tactics: the only power likely to obstruct, France, Salisbury had deftly
squared by indicating to her representative, Waddington, that no British
hindrance of any French plans concerning Tunisia need be expected in
the future.
Cyprus proved almost immediately a sad disappointment. What height
of hopes was set on it is illustrated in the person of the first British high
commissioner sent there. This was no less than Sir Garnet Wolseley, the
empire’s foremost soldier (who at once set a subaltern, Kitchener, to make
the first accurate survey of the island). But Wolseley was called to other
and more urgent imperial duties, and no one of similar standing, then or
later, succeeded him in Cyprus. It was never suitable as a place d'armes : the
climate was bad and the harbours inadequate. Nor could it act as a light-
house of British influence. It really was not feasible to stalk the Russians
at Kars from Cyprus. While British military consuls were in Asia Minor,
as a consequence of the Berlin Treaty, it retained some value; but when in
1881 these consuls were withdrawn, it was left with none. Only the dictates
of imperial prestige excused its retention. Cyprus was to remain as a useful
illustration of a marriage between bad politics and worse strategy.
It was symbolic of its time that a treaty arranged in a suburb of
Constantinople should have been tom up and something quite otherwise
substituted in a conference at a European capital. But the area over which
Europe held this strategic sway was never as entirely passive as European
diplomatists would have liked. The Levant indeed contained a civilisation
which, in Salisbury’s words, ‘hung back from the general movement of
the world’, but it did not lack for princes in whom a quickness of political
acumen had been sharpened by long experience of public and personal
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hazard. Owning no power of any effective weight in a European scale,
they resorted to a guile that came naturally. The British Raj in India paid
one Amir in Afghanistan £200,000 a year between 1857 and 1863 and
in 1879 it promised another Amir £120,000; from 1881 it disbursed to a
successor £80,000, raising this from 1893 to £120,000 again. But loyalty
to an alien system was hardly something that could be so bought; and
Cromer, greatest of all the alien proconsuls in this period in the Middle
East, always insisted, to quote his book Modern Egypt, that British
officials must try to remember ‘ that they are not dealing with the inhabi-
tants of Kent or Norfolk’, and that it was ridiculous to apply in indigna-
tion the term ‘disloyal’ to those who displayed either a lukewarm
acquiescence only or a frank hostility. The Russians could not afford
subsidies, and paid none; and although they recruited members of the
conquered Muslim races of central Asia into their frontier armies, they
spent little time in trusting them and accordingly felt the less surprise
when revolt broke out in Khokand or Turkestan. The French did their
utmost to present the Muslims of the southern Mediterranean littoral
with an alternative civilisation, but as Islam was incapable of divorcing
its culture from its faith, these Levantine evolues were not the men to
whom the illiterate peasantry beneath could ever give its trust. Asian
opinion, of whatever kind, wore whatever mask it thought best suited to
the situation. ‘Ses victimes’, observed a Sherif of Mecca of British
imperialism, ‘sont condamnes a vivre.’ The fate of Arabi in Egypt, whose
military coup of 1882 rested on genuine nationalist and radical founda-
tions, served notice to more than his own generation of Egyptians, Arabs,
and Persians that it was dangerous to lay the mask aside.
An eastern ruler in power would naturally concur with the foreign
theory concerning the value of the status quo. But his conservative out-
look was never enough to ensure his own personal survival: even Shah
Nasir-al-Din, who ruled in Persia for forty-eight years, was to die under
the knife in 1896. The foreigner might genuinely wish to ‘protect’ the
client state beneath its pliant prince, and, while doing so, keep clear of the
state’s internal affairs. But three things were likely to happen which made
it impossible for him to continue any such policy of ‘masterly inactivity’.
The prince might either turn traitor to his protector, as Sher Ali was
supposed to have done in Afghanistan between 1875 and 1878; or he
might succumb in his weakness to the pressure from a rival protector, as
both Russia and Great Britain feared might happen to the Shah of Persia
at any time. Alternatively, his government might dissolve through sheer
ineptitude, and thus leave a vacuum in a vital region which some power
of Europe would assuredly take it upon itself to fill. Egypt illustrates the
best example of this contingency; but indeed it was only the innate mutual
suspicion of each other’s ambitions that prevented the powers from dis-
solving, on exactly similar grounds, the Ottoman empire itself.
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The history of the Middle East in this period thus centres on this
problem: how to ensure the good government of ‘backward areas’ which
were vital to European commerce, strategy, and communication but
whose inhabitants had few interests that corresponded with those of the
Europeans themselves. To this problem, the soldiers of the three European
powers directly involved produced a similar and a simple answer. Their
solution was, to garrison the area in strength. But only the Russians, who
had no manpower shortage, found this a practicable policy. Politicians of
the Third French Republic always distrusted those aristocratic clericals
and monarchists to whom they had, in an unguarded moment, consigned
the development of the French empire, and they were accordingly loath
to see the sway of such anywhere extended. The British, even before they
had it confirmed to them by an American naval historian, harked back to
a romantic tradition of storm-beaten ships on which grand armies never
looked, and preferred a theory of remote control and the glamour of an
imperial prestige. In practice, however, behind all their dealings in areas
east of Suez stood the very tangible reality of their Indian army, units of
which were to be found in these decades in places as remote from India as
Malta, the Sudan, Somaliland, and Malaya.
In the Middle East, indeed, the conjuncture of the British navy with the
Indian army gave the British a system of power — well described by Lord
Rosebery as one of ‘authoritative advice’ — that no rival in the area could
match. Disraeli, having been the first to recognise this fact of power,
always underlined it. It was not a question, he exclaimed in 1878, when
the Indian government’s invasion of Afghanistan was under fire, of the
Khyber Pass merely; it was a question that concerned the character and
influence of England in Europe. Nor was it a question of upholding the
Turks : the true issue was, as Queen Victoria agreed, whether there should
be a British or a Russian supremacy in the world. In taking Cyprus, the
movement and the motive were not Mediterranean, but Indian. A great
power, after all, was one that had a certain freedom of movement, one
that could control and direct events. When the interest of Europe,
Salisbury pointed out, centred in conflicts that were waged in Spain,
England had occupied Gibraltar. When matters were grave in Italy,
England took Malta. When it seemed likely that the interest of Europe
would centre on Asia Minor or on Egypt, England occupied Cyprus.
Soon after this statement England occupied Egypt also, as if to underline
his point.
Three cases of Middle Eastern complication, which unavoidably
affected the policies of the European powers, display similar character-
istics.
The crisis in Afghanistan formed itself out of the simple desire ex-
pressed by the British and Indian governments to find out what Russia
had set on foot in central Asia. Between 1864 and 1869 the Russians had
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made great strides. In 1864 they occupied Tchemkend, in 1865 Tashkent.
In 1866 they went forward into Khojend and broke the power of the Khan
of Khokand. In 1867 they invaded the khanate of Bokhara, and
established fortified posts far to the south of the Syr Daria (Jaxartes)
river; they also constituted their new province of Turkestan, making it a
viceroyalty for General Kaufmann with his headquarters at Tashkent.
In 1868 they captured Samarkand, capital of Bokhara, and made it clear
that the Amir henceforward lived as their satellite. In 1874, despite
assurances from the tsar’s personal representative in London, Peter
Shuvalov, that no such thing would happen, the same fate befell the khan
of Khiva. It was impossible to argue that the disappearance of the
sovereign power of these Central Asian khanates was a blow to human
progress, as their best-known attributes were slave-raiding, slave-trading,
and a general condition of fanatical barbarism. Gorchakov’s declara-
tions that Russia’s mission in the east was one of civilisation was therefore
hard to dismiss as mere bombast by the British, who had long asserted the
selfsame doctrine in regard to their own relations with the native states of
India.
In this missionary competition lay the key to all British unease about
the Russian forward movement in Asia, that must bring it, inevitably and
finally, to the Indian border. Those ‘Anglo-Indian’ soldiers and civilians
who advocated that the British, too, should go forward to meet the
advancing Russians, so that the line of actual contact, when made, should
be as far distant as possible from India itself, did not do so because they
feared direct attack from Russian military might, or had exaggerated
notions about the value of Afghan assistance or Persian friendship. Sir
Henry Rawlinson, a very influential member of the Secretary of State’s
Council for India, who kept insisting for years that the British should
move into Quetta in Kelat, into Kandahar in southern and into Herat in
western Afghanistan, so that they might be supplied with ‘ a series of first-
class fortresses in advance of our present territorial border and on the
most accessible line of attack’, urged as his reason the fact that India was
a conquered country. Therefore, there must always be a ‘certain amount
of discontent’ smouldering, which would be fanned into a chronic con-
flagration by the contiguity of a rival European power. Every Indian
prince and chief, his colleague Sir Bartle Frere warned the India Office in
June 1874, would see in the Russians ‘a possible alternative claimant for
empire in India’, and all the disaffected there, all the dangerous and
criminal classes, would be on the qui vive ready to strike at a moment’s
notice. Sir Richard Temple classified the malcontents who might be
tempted to become pawns in the Russian game : they were the princes, the
priests, the soldiers, and the mob. A foreign reader of Temple’s book
India in 1880 (and he had many) might well have wondered who in India
remained to be ‘loyal’. General Roberts, commanding-in-chief in India
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in 1888, took an even gloomier view of the extent of the ‘loyalty’ of all
these subjects of the queen. They were all agreed that once Russia was
arrived on the Indian frontier, both the physical and the psychological
security of the British Raj would have vanished. India would no longer
be an ‘island’. It would no longer be possible to propagate a ‘Monroe
Doctrine’ concerning it. And, as a direct consequence, England herself
would become a continental state like any other.
To Asians, therefore, Russia presented herself as the great alternative,
the other imperial protector. It was this, and not any calculation as to
the efficiency of Russian armies or to the extent of the ambitions of the
generals, that formed the solid foundation for that ‘Central Asian
Question’ which bedevilled the British Foreign Office during the eighty
years that spanned between the Russo-Persian treaty of Turkmanchai and
the Anglo-Russian convention of 1907.
As Russell put it in i860, England did not want to begin a struggle with
Russia for influence in Central Asia — ‘ but what we aim at is that Russia
shall not take advantage of her relations with Persia and her means of
pressure on the states of Central Asia to encroach upon countries which
it concerns us should remain in the possession of native rulers, and be
undisturbed by foreign intrigue’. Consequently Afghanistan had to stay
alive, as a buffer-state between the Russian and the British empires in
Asia. But it must also be more than that: and the breakdown of the
Anglo-Russian negotiations between 1869 and 1873 to make of the
country a genuinely ‘neutral zone’ between the two empires illustrated
the peculiar British interpretation of the words ‘foreign intrigue’. Sher
Ali, the Amir in Kabul, was too important to the Indian government to
be allowed by it to enjoy the privileges and the status of a neutral, as the
Russians had suggested. The Amir must certainly be ‘independent’ — but
he must also agree to live in friendly relations with the Raj. Facts of life in
Asia had to be recognised for what they were. It did not serve to make
any firm treaty with Russia on the grounds of uti possidetis, both powers
promising not to cross certain limits. All limits in Central Asia were
unreal, as Gorchakov had already found out after publishing his hopes in
November 1864 that Russian armies could stop at Tchemkend. More-
over, neither the Russians nor the British could afford to tie themselves
down to fixed positions of which the march of events might make
geographical nonsense. In 1873 the two powers agreed only to fix a
northern border for Sher Ali’s country, and Russia indicated that she
considered Afghanistan outside of her sphere of political influence. She
considered that this agreement left her a free hand elsewhere in Central
Asia, and was genuinely annoyed when she discovered after the fall of
Khiva that England thought otherwise. But at least one boundary had
been traced, and a pattern was set. Central Asia thus early provided
Europe with the problem that was later to face it in Africa : there came a
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time when some kind of international imprimatur on frontiers had to be
obtained, unless one party or the other was determined to bring an issue
to the point of war.
The facts of life in Asia were of course unpalatable to Asians themselves.
Sher Ali, although he wanted its money and its recognition, wanted to be
left alone by the Raj, which he did not forget had deserted him during the
five years (1863-8) he had battled his way to his throne, and which had
handed over to his Persian enemies a large part of his frontier province of
Seistan (1872). But isolation was not allowed him: what would he do
with it? His refusal to allow the Viceroy to station British ‘observers’ in
his country provoked the crisis. Salisbury, the Conservative Secretary of
State for India, felt it impossible to continue to ‘leave the keys of the gate
in the hands of a warder of more than doubtful integrity, who insists, as
an indispensable condition of his service, that his movements shall not be
observed’. He did not propose to send a British mission into Afghanistan
against the wishes of the Amir, but he did propose ‘to tell the Govern-
ment of India to make the Amir wish it’. In Lytton as Viceroy he had a
ready agent. Lytton took the view that Sher Ali was an unreliable savage
who would play politics between England and Russia if he had the chance;
his correspondence with Kaufmann at Tashkent, begun in 1870, should
now cease. Lytton first consolidated his frontier in Baluchistan and Kelat,
and made Quetta a base before he began his abortive parleys with Sher
Ali. Simultaneously the Russians increased their pressure. Expecting
war with England in the spring of 1878, they sent columns of troops to the
Afghan borders from Samarqand and their Caspian base, Krasnovodsk.
On the very day that the European congress convened at Berlin, Kaufmann
sent from Tashkent a military mission to Kabul, where, six weeks later,
Sher Ali received it with honour. Lytton determined that a British
mission should be similarly received, thus putting the Amir, once and for
all, to the test. This mission Sher Ali caused to be rebuffed at the frontier,
although no shot was fired ; and, despite alarm within the British cabinet
that no genuine casus belli existed, in November 1878 Lytton sent the
Indian army into Afghanistan, for the second time in forty years.
Sher Ali fled, to die mysteriously in Russian Turkestan (February
1879). A pliable successor at Kabul signed a treaty in May, accepting
British agents and putting his foreign policy at the Raj's disposal in
return for a handsome salary. But the British Resident and his staff were
murdered in Kabul (3 September) ; the new Amir threw his hand in, and
Afghanistan was left to the marching armies of robber barons before the
boldest of these, Abdur Rahman, arrived from Turkestan and consoli-
dated the position as he wanted it. He made a similar deal with the
Raj, but at a lesser wage as he was that much less to be trusted. The
experiment of putting British agents into his country was now called off.
The Liberals, who when in opposition had condemned the entire Afghan
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policy as a piece of piracy, decided to pull the Indian army out of the
province of Kandahar, and in April 1881 Afghanistan was left in the
control of its new and distinctly dubious ruler.
Critics asserted that nothing had been resolved : the keys of the Indian
gate were still in the hands of a warder of doubtful integrity, still insistent
that his movements should not be observed. They were answered that the
nature of the problem was such that it could not be solved by the exercise
of military tactics alone. It was not merely a question of Kandahar,
Liberals declared — thus maliciously paraphrasing some of Disraeli’s earlier
dicta — it was a question affecting the entire course of England’s policy in
Asia. Could England garrison the entire perimeter of her Indian empire
— when it could be said (indeed, it frequently was said) that that peri-
meter extended from Quetta to Gibraltar in the west, and from Burma to
Hong Kong and Wellington in the east? Clearly not : and thus the defen-
sive security of half the world must depend not on British soldiers nor
even on British sailors, but on the respect and confidence that British
policy commanded, on the degree of assurance felt by other nations that
British policy marched with the interest of humanity at large, that it was a
policy designed to promote peace and commerce among men. If England
forgot this, and went in for a policy of aggression or of confiscation of
other people’s property, she would at once make enemies on every side,
and the Russians would not have far to look for assistance in their work
of subverting the British empire.
The truth of this diagnosis was soon proved to Liberals themselves,
when next year their government bombarded Alexandria and occupied
Egypt— an imperialist action which was to cripple British foreign policy
vis-a-vis that of both France and Germany for the next twenty years.
Liberals were to spend nearly all of these years in the political wilderness,
but they continued to assert their original view, put with his usual
common sense by Campbell-Bannerman. ‘ The truth is,’ he remarked, ‘ we
cannot provide for a fighting empire, and nothing can give us the power.’
Indeed, it was pointless to try to get it. Russia itself was far from being
a ‘fighting empire’; while the most efficient militarist state in contempor-
ary Europe, Bismarck’s imperial Germany, was profoundly pacific in its
external policies. It was therefore a waste of time both for the Russians
and the British to base their diplomacy on military machines which would
inevitably — as was ultimately proved to the British in South Africa and to
the Russians at Tshushima — fail to meet whatever tests were placed upon
them. Thus, while the British decision to evacuate Kandahar considerably
puzzled Giers at St Petersburg, it ushered in a period of mutual compromise
in the affairs of Central Asia. This policy was to stand a number of tests
with success, two of which — the Penjdeh incident of 1885 and the in-
creasing Russian penetration of Persia — contained as much political
dynamite as had the mission of 1878 to Kabul.
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It is in its Persian aspect that this phase of European diplomacy is best
examined. Matters in Persia never came to that point of danger reached
in Afghanistan because the two powers concerned took care not to let
them do so. This was not because the Persian situation presented a lesser
degree of complication than the other. From the British standpoint,
Persia was an ante-room to India far more readily accessible to a hostile
invader than Afghanistan. After the fall of Khiva in 1874, the whole
region to the north of Persia (and Persia had no defined northern frontier)
was placed under the administration of the Russian general Lomakin,
who described himself as ‘chief plenipotentiary’ of the area. With Khiva
secure, the Russians were able to establish themselves on the lower Oxus
river, thus solving what had been their severest problem of supply and
communication. Previously, Tashkent and the province of Turkestan
had had to be supplied from Orenburg, 800 miles away over the desert
from the Syr Daria river. But, from the Caspian through Khiva and
beyond, the Oxus was navigable, and it was simple to plan new overland
communication by road or rail that would connect with Samarqand and
Tashkent on the one flank and with Krasnovodsk on the other. The
Persian flank, the undemarcated regions of Khorassan, roamed by Turko-
man tribes, lay exposed. The new Russian incursion had therefore made
of Herat the ‘key’ not only to western Afghanistan, to Kabul, and so to
India, but also to Kandahar and the Persian Gulf. The fall of Khiva had
thus swung the true centre of gravity, as far as the security of India was
concerned, away from the Afghan mountains to the Persian and Turko-
man plains.
The shah was prepared to assert his sovereignty over the northern
Turkomans could he have got British support: but although from 1874
the name of Merv (often thought to be a great city, but in fact a mud
village with an oasis) was often talked of by British statesmen and pub-
licists, since it lay only twelve days’ march from Herat, Whitehall was not
prepared to commit itself. British military agents in Khorassan — there
‘for the love of adventure peculiar to Englishmen’, as Giers was assured
by the British ambassador at St Petersburg — continued to report on the
growth of Russian influence. The shah visited St Petersburg in 1878, and
brought back to Teheran General Kosagovsky, who set about organising a
Cossack Brigade — ‘ one of the main arms of Russian influence in Persia
for the next forty years ’. Salisbury, now transferred from the India to
the Foreign Office, wished some counteracting British infl uence to be
established quickly; for ‘it might very well be that at a later period the
imperious exigencies of her position towards Russia’ might force upon
England the necessity of obtaining, at far greater cost, the alliance or the
neutrality of Persia. He thought to offer the shah Herat itself, which
Persia had long coveted, and a convention to that end was actually drawn
up (8 November 1879). But the cabinet disliked the idea, for if once
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England installed a protege in Herat she would be committed to keeping
him there, and this entailed a British garrison, as Persian forces would
make no sort of show against the Russians if the latter objected. The shah
sought to bargain, and advised the Russians of what was afoot: England
promptly dropped the convention, and the shah with it. The incoming
Liberal government was anxious to work with Russia, and stood back
while Russia and Persia negotiated a boundary for part of the northern
area (ai December 1881). A secret clause of this Akhal-Khorassan con-
vention contained a Persian renunciation of any claim over the Turkoman
territory, which still stretched from the limits of the newly agreed frontier
at Sarakhs some 200 miles north-east towards the Oxus river.
It was to the British, though not to the Russian, interest that this
remaining gap in the Indian perimeter should be closed. It was still the
Afghan rather than the Persian situation that obsessed the India Office;
for if Russian forces, advancing to their new limits, displaced bands of
Turkomans into Afghan territory and pursued them, as well they might,
there was a very serious possibility of a resultant Russo-Afghan clash.
But no British suggestion that he should claim Merv and its dependencies
for himself, and so interpose his sovereignty as a buffer between the on-
coming Russians and the open Afghan flank, could now win the shah.
Merv submitted to the Russians in February 1884. At once the Indian
government urged on the Foreign Office the absolute necessity ‘to come
to a clear understanding with Russia as to the exact line of the north and
north-west frontiers of Afghanistan’, and an Anglo-Russian negotiation
began on how best to draw a line from Sarakhs to the Oxus. For every
solution London presented St Petersburg had a difficulty, and not until
1888 was the line actually drawn. The Russians by that time could afford
to waive their objection, as their Transcaspian railway from Krasnovodsk
had been brought by Annenkov’s military engineers to within 100 miles of
Herat.
The rancorous frontier debate was interrupted, on 30 March 1885, by
the celebrated incident at Penjdeh, an Afghan village from which Russian
forces displaced the inhabitants — an event that threw the issue of peace or
war between the European powers in Central Asia to the whim of the amir
Abdur Rahman at Kabul, for if he had chosen to declare this a casus belli ,
it would have been hard for the official protectors of his foreign policy, the
Indian government, to gainsay him. The British government, isolated in
Europe, its regular forces in Egypt and the Sudan, drew up hasty war-plans
for attacking Vladivostock and the Caucasus — long considered by Anglo-
Indian strategists the key to all Russian power in the Middle East — but
the Caucasus could not be reached without a penetration of the Straits,
and Bismarck was not disposed to grant the consent of Europe to any such
action. Fortunately, the amir let the matter go — but another such inci-
dent might prove too much for everyone’s strained nerves, and England’s
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need to keep Persia friendly grew more pressing than ever. While the
Afghan frontier was being demarcated, Russian pressure increased at
Teheran, and in August 1887, Russia won a signal victory: the shah
agreed to consult the tsar before he granted to foreign companies any con-
cessions to build roads, waterways, or railways. It appeared that Russia
was intending to make all Persia her sphere of influence, a policy which
could take her one day to the Persian Gulf. The shah knew this too, and he
threatened to throw in his lot entirely with ‘the good-tempered tiger’ in
the north unless the English did something concrete for him.
What the shah wanted was an alliance. This of course he could not have.
The Conservative government had necessarily fallen heir to the Liberal
programme of Anglo-Russian amity, and Salisbury was resolved to pay
no heed to the shah, who would inevitably compromise British foreign
policy if he got the chance. In October 1 887 Sir Henry Drummond Wolff
was sent to Persia to inaugurate a new era of Anglo-Russian harmony in
that country. Surely both powers were entitled to their legitimate share in
the markets of Persia? But, behind such a suggestion, inevitably loomed
a policy of an ultimate partition of Persia into joint spheres of influence.
Salisbury might dislike the idea equally with Giers, but Wolff went on
promoting it and attracting the attention of Europe to it until Lansdowne
as Viceroy of India pointed out to him that any encouragement to Russia
to build railways in northern Persia, while the British busied themselves
building railways in the south, flatly contradicted every principle of
security on which the Raj had ever depended. Wolff’s main achievement
was in inducing the shah to open the Karan river in southern Persia to the
mercantile marine of all countries. ‘C’etait la’, was Giers’ comment, ‘une
maniere de parler.’
Russia was indeed more alarmed by the thought of some new and
concentrated financial exploitation of Persia by the British than by any
Anglo-Indian scheme concerning Herat. It was the age of economic
imperialism, and of all the great powers Russia was the worst-equipped to
play a hand in the game. Since she had no capital with which to build
railways in Persia, she determined that no one should build them. In
October 1890, therefore, the shah further agreed not to entertain any
scheme for railway construction, from whatever quarter it came, for
fifteen years; and this agreement was kept, for Persia had no railway
within its borders when war struck Europe in 1914. Till then, Russian
influence remained dominant at Teheran, the Russian Bank supreme, and
to Russia fell the preponderance of Persia’s trade. ‘ The independence of
Persia’, Edward Grey justly observed in 1903, ‘is a phrase.’
Thus, although the British were unable to erect a fool-proof system of
‘elaborate palisades’ around Afghanistan and Persia, the balance of
power between themselves and the Russians maintained diplomatic equi-
librium, and with it a condition of peace. Moreover, in an age of im-
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perialist competition the problem became overlaid: after 1887 the
attention of the tsar and his military advisers turned to the Far East, to
Manchuria and to the warm water obtainable at Port Arthur. Russia by
so extending herself naturally increased her own degree of vulnerability,
and Britain, by allying at the close of this period (1902) with Japan, did
not omit to underline this point. Russia was by then, what she had not
been in Palmerston’s time, too intricately involved in the European state-
system to be able to indulge in eastern buccaneering: and from a British
standpoint, the Russians in Teheran might well be preferred to the
Germans with a railway terminus on the Persian Gulf, the Russians even
at Constantinople to a German economic penetration of Turkey. By
1899 it was Russia, not Britain, who was most loudly affirming a deter-
mination to keep the territorial integrity of the Ottoman empire intact.
But Britain, too, was by then tied to other powers’ policies, and she, like
Russia, never managed to break this chain.
This had come about because of the stake she had put down in
Egypt. After 1882 what Grey was to call ‘the logic of an imperial posi-
tion’ — a phrase he used when he found himself constrained in 1915 to
promise Constantinople as a war-trophy to the tsar — was positively
forced on the attention of British governments, to such a degree that after
1 895 Salisbury was eager for accommodation with both France and Russia
on almost any terms short of the evacuation of Egypt. The logic of an
imperial position had made it unsafe to move of one’s own will in any
direction at all. Except for the Boer war, the occupation of Egypt in 1882
was the last unilateral step ever taken by the British empire.
‘What we want’, said Derby when Foreign Secretary in 1876, ‘is an
uninterrupted passage through Egypt and the absence of any foreign
control over that country.’ But this was to want a very great deal,
because Egypt was already a European colony. In 1870 there were
seventeen foreign consulates in the country, representing about 100,000
foreigners concentrated in Cairo and Alexandria, foreigners who until
1876 paid no taxes to the Egyptian government at all. Egypt at this time,
as Cromer later put it, ‘must have been an earthly paradise for all who
had money to lend at usurious rates of interest, or third-rate goods of
which they wished to dispose at first-rate prices ’. The Suez Canal, the
main line of steam communication to the East, was owned by French
interests, and France as a result held an unchallenged ascendancy over the
khedive Ismail and his government. Up to 1873, the total interest paid
on account of sums borrowed by the Egyptian government in connection
with the costs of the canal’s construction amounted to £6 million. The
interest on Egypt’s foreign loans amounted to almost £5 million a year, a
sum greater than the whole of her annual revenue during the reign of
Ismail’s predecessor, Said. European bondholders thus had a great stake
in Egyptian insolvency; in 1876 the report of Stephen Cave, the British
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paymaster-general, emphasised that Egypt could not go on ‘serving
floating debts at 25 per cent and raising loans at 12 to 15 per cent to meet
additions to her indebtedness which do not bring a single piastre into her
exchequer’. Ismail’s necessity to raise money inevitably made him gamble
with his country’s greatest asset, the Suez Canal itself (paying its first
dividend, of 5 per cent, by 1875). In 1874 he gave an option to a French
banker for the purchase of the Egyptian government’s holding of 40 per
cent of the ordinary shares, at a price of £3! million. Disraeli in 1875
bought through Rothschilds these 176,602 shares, as is well known, for
over £4 million.
Although he quite correctly described this transaction in the House of
Commons as political rather than financial, it was not such a sweeping
triumph as his ‘You have it, Madam’ implied: no voting power accom-
panied these ordinary shares, as Ismail had been deprived of this by the
Canal Company in 1871. In negotiation, de Lesseps as President of the
Company did grant back to Great Britain the missing ten votes, but he
allotted to her three seats only, on the council of twenty-four members.
Disraeli’s coup nevertheless compelled the British government to take a
greater interest in Egyptian finance, and Cave’s mission of investigation
(January-March 1876) was the immediate result. But France still held
the preponderance, of political as well as of financial interest. It was
significant that at the Berlin Conference in 1878 she would not permit
Egypt — or, for that matter, Syria, the Holy Places, or Tunis— to appear
on the agenda.
On 8 April 1878 Ismail was forced to suspend payment on his Treasury
bills. On 2 May he issued a decree providing for the establishment of an
international Caisse de la Dette Publique, to consist of one French, one
Italian, one Austrian, and one British national (Evelyn Baring, appointed
by the British bondholders, not by the government). There now began an
unedifying series of financial squabbles, many of which were taken to
extra-territorial courts whose unannounced principle was to recognise
only the claims of their own nationals. The European bondholders ob-
jected when the Caisse funded the entire bonded and floating debt at
£91 million, at per cent interest. Their representatives, Joubert and
Goschen, reorganised the funding, and recommended the appointment of
two Controllers, one to collect and one to control expenditure. An inter-
national board was also instituted to manage the railways, the telegraph,
and the harbour of Alexandria, revenues from which were already ear-
marked in advance. To this arrangement the ‘floating’ debt-holders —
mainly British — further objected; and between these millstones the ad-
ministration of Egypt ground to a standstill.
In March 1878 the British and the French governments took their first
official step. They appointed an Anglo-French commission of inquiry.
By August this commission had transformed itself into the responsible
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ministry of the Egyptian government: Ismail was now a prisoner in the
hands of his creditors. Naturally, he was calculatedly unhelpful to his own
ministers, all Christians — Nubar Pasha, Rivers Wilson, and de Blignieres
— and, after organising two popular demonstrations against them,
managed by April 1879 to get rid of them. It was too successful an action.
On 18 May Bismarck surprisingly made himself spokesman for the
European bondholders, and the powers put pressure on the sultan at
Constantinople. The latter, on 26 June 1879, sent Ismail a telegram
addressing him as ‘ex-Khedive of Egypt’. From September his successor
Tewfik was made firmly subordinate to an Anglo-French ‘Dual Control’,
as personified by Baring and de Blignieres. Although they passed a ‘law of
liquidation’ of the debt (17 July 1880) interest charges on it continued to
absorb 37 per cent of Egypt’s revenue; even by 1913 this figure still
amounted to 22 per cent. Another of their economies was the sale to the
Credit Fonder in 1880, at a bargain price of £880,000, of the Egyptian
government’s preference shares in the Canal Company, entitling it to
15 per cent of the profits. In consequence, from then until 1936, Egypt was
to draw no revenue at all from the Canal.
The Controllers also reduced the Egyptian army from 45,000 to 18,000
officers and men, thus giving discontent its leaders. Ahmed Arabi was
however more than a disgruntled colonel, representative only of dis-
gruntled colonels: anti-Turkish, anti-foreign, radical views had been
gaining ground in Egypt among the intelligentsia for ten years or more.
But whatever Arabi was, the foreign governors of Egypt could not brook
his rivalry in the matter of control of the khedive and his country. His
victory over Tewfik in September 1881, when he forced the khedive to
accept the nationalists’ demands for representative government and a
larger army, ultimately brought a sharp Anglo-French Note (8 January
1882), conceived mainly by Gambetta. This emphasised support for
Tewfik and menaced any opposition to him. Its main result was to annoy
the sultan, alarm the powers, and alienate opinion in Egypt itself even
further. From a foreign viewpoint the local situation continued to
deteriorate, and when Tewfik appealed to the powers to rescue him from
Arabi and his machinations, an Anglo-French naval squadron appeared
off Alexandria in May.
England still hoped to get the Turks to rectify the situation in what was,
after all, one of their subject-provinces ; but the Turkish contribution to
the problem of sending two commissioners to Cairo, one of whom nego-
tiated with the khedive and the other with Arabi, was unhelpful. The
French, once Gambetta was gone, found no consistent policy to pursue;
their British colleagues found none either, swithered between joint action
and internationalisation, lost their balance and tumbled, as Dilke put it,
into Egypt. The conference of ambassadors at Constantinople (23 June),
sandwiched as it was between a first outbreak of anti-foreign riots in
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Alexandria and a second, reached no concrete conclusion. Further riots
brought about a British naval bombardment (n July), from which the
French squadron absented itself on instruction. There followed, after a
month’s delay, the mobilisation of a British army corps under Sir Garnet
Wolseley and its dispatch to Egypt, where on 13 September it routed
Arabi’s forces at Tel-el-Kebir. The British were masters of Egypt. By this
action, as John Morley pointed out, England had made herself, at long last,
a territorial power in the Mediterranean. Palmerston’s worst fears con-
cerning the menace that lurked within the whole concept of a canal
through Egypt had been remarkably realised.
Granville from the Foreign Office circularised the powers on 3 January
1883 that the British occupation was only temporary. But, having over-
turned the only administrative system that Egypt possessed, it was not
possible for the uneasy Liberals — 128 of whom had abstained from voting
credits for Wolseley’s expedition — to walk away, washing their hands.
They wanted to reform the administration and evacuate Egypt, for con-
tinuing to govern Egypt must lay an unwarrantable burden on an already
overtaxed British empire. But their policy, as their own agent-general.
Baring (later Lord Cromer), acidly put it, was not one ‘capable of execu-
tion’. If one reformed an oriental state, one had to stay to guard the
reformation. Dufferin reported in 1883 that even the germs of constitu-
tional progress were absent in Egypt. The introduction of European skills
was therefore pointless unless they were backed with European authority.
For getting out of Egypt, Baring pointed out to Granville, was a very
different matter from getting out of Afghanistan. No one, after all, was
interested in the internal business of Afghanistan but the Afghans them-
selves. Such a quasi-barbarous people could well be left to the mercies of
their own quasi-barbarous governors. To be sure, in Egypt the moral and
material conditions of the people were scarcely less barbarous than in
Afghanistan. But on these foundations was built ‘a top-heavy and exotic
superstructure, such as an enormous external debt. Western law courts,
complete liberty of contract, and, in fact, all the paraphernalia of Euro-
pean civilisation, with some of its worst and not many of its best features’.
He did not suppose, he added, that Europe would stand by and let this
superstructure fall to pieces. England thus stood guardian hereafter for
the interests of Europe in Egypt ; but she could expect no applause for the
role, as no European consul-general in Cairo could fail to observe that his
British colleague alone had an army at his back — still 4700 men in 1888 —
with which to support whatever he might suggest for the European good.
The Egyptian deficit was a continuing European question ; England could
follow no independent policy. Lord Lyons from Paris noted ‘ the natural
disposition of almost all Europe to side against us on the Egyptian
question’. To Baring fell the task of maintaining his country’s authority
while at the same time concealing the fact as best he could that he was
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maintaining it at all. When, in 1892, a new young khedive, Abbas II,
thought to assert himself and insisted on changing the personnel of his
own ministry, he at once had the length of his political chain made clear
to him. Rosebery backed Baring’s insistence that Her Majesty’s govern-
ment ‘expected to be consulted in such important matters as a change of
Ministers ’. Baring disliked the incident, complaining that it ‘ brought him
out of his hiding-place’, and that this was enough to shatter the system.
To the French, the hiding-place was never hard to discover, the system
was always a usurpation. Any khedive of Egypt must necessarily be, in
Freycinet’s words, ‘souverain a la mode anglaise’ — a comment Baring
considered ironical, when he looked enviously over towards the French
position in Tunisia, where no law was valid unless signed by the French
resident-general. Disappointed of their rather sanguine expectation
that, after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, the Dual Control would be re-
established, the French had ‘reserved their liberty of action in Egypt’, an
expression signifying that henceforward France would do her best to
hamper British administration in the country and British foreign policy in
general. This loss of an entente that had operated for over forty years made
Britain more and more dependent on the goodwill of the one important
European power with whom she had as yet no direct cause of quarrel —
Germany. It was a situation Bismarck was able to exploit to the full.
The British found no way out of the impasse into which they had
stumbled in Egypt. They could not take over Egypt and govern it ac-
cording to sensible colonial or Indian methods, for that would have given
the signal for the general partition of the Ottoman empire, and this was
not to be risked. For what would not France, what would not Russia do,
and how could England, already bailiff in two Turkish dependencies,
object? Unlooked-for complication arising in the Sudan — an area which
was either Turkish or ownerless, but was certainly not British — made the
Penjdeh incident really dangerous. When this dispute with Russia de-
veloped, the five thousand troops that had been sent to the Sudan to
rescue Gordon had to be summoned home, and Khartoum was visited
only to be left again, and the Sudan handed over to the Khalifa and to
anarchy for another ten years. The centre of gravity in Egyptian affairs
was not Cairo, nor even Paris, but Berlin. Egypt was the only place where
Bismarck could successfully apply pressure on British policy, after the
Russian mode in Central Asia. Of this pressure repercussions were felt
from Angra Pequena to New Guinea; while the conference that was
convened at Berlin in 1884, to lay down a programme and a methodology
for the partition of Africa, was controlled entirely by Bismarck and Jules
Ferry, and its decisions as a natural result cut across many a ‘sphere of
influence’ marked out in that continent by optimistic Britons.
Salisbury like Gladstone tried to retire from this impasse. He likened
England’s position in Egypt to the difficulty ‘a man has in getting credit
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from the neighbouring tradesmen when he is only staying at an hotel’, and
he assured the French ambassador, Waddington, that he was only looking
‘for the means of withdrawing with honour’. This he never found. As the
international code of the day was constituted, it was not possible for one
imperial nation to withdraw ‘with honour’ under pressure from another:
John Bull would not leave Egypt as long as France bade him to. Salisbury
followed Gladstone, moreover, in his hope that the Turks might still be
induced to take up their own responsibility, both in Egypt and in the
Sudan. Drummond Wolff, prior to his Persian adventures, was in Cairo
in August 1885, under instruction to accept the principle of evacuation,
without however arranging a date for it, or binding the British govern-
ment to obtain the consent of the European powers to anything it might
decide to do. These negotiations were ultimately transferred to Constan-
tinople, and there, on 22 May 1887, Drummond Wolff presented a
masterful convention for the sultan’s ratification.
Under this convention, the British pledged themselves to withdraw from
Egypt within three years. There was however a clause that allowed the
British the right of re-entry ‘ upon the appearance of danger from without ’ ;
of this appearance of danger, the British themselves were to be the judge.
Salisbury had already made it clear to Waddington that this was the point
on which Her Majesty’s government most insisted, and that the British
had no intention of leaving Egypt unless this right of re-entry were con-
ceded. Moreover, in the fifth article of Drummond Wolff’s convention it
was stated that if the khedive misbehaved, and disorder ensued in Egypt,
both the Ottoman empire and the British government would have the
right to send troops to keep order; and, even if the Turks did not avail
themselves of this right, the British might still do so. As if this was not
enough, Wolff added that, if one of the Mediterranean powers did not
accept this convention and would not ratify it, that refusal in itself would
be considered as ‘the appearance of a danger from without’, sufficient to
prevent the departure of a single British soldier from the Egyptian shore.
The terms of this convention caused a major diplomatic explosion, and
ushered in a period of the most bitter Anglo-French colonial rivalry. The
sultan was mercilessly browbeaten by the French and Russian ambassa-
dors, and was told that, if he consented to ratify this baleful instrument,
France and Russia would consider that they had thereby been given the
right to occupy provinces of his empire like Syria and Armenia, and to
leave them only after a similar convention had been concluded. This right
of reoccupation of Egypt given to the British was such that, for all
practical purposes, the government of the Ottoman empire was being
divided between England and the sultan. France could never entertain the
idea that Egypt should pass once and for all into the control of a single
great power. Nelidov, the Russian envoy, was as vehement : by this con-
vention Russia would lose the possibility of making Egypt, as she had
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made Turkestan, a pawn to be used in return for English concession to
Russian ambition in the Balkans. Here a principle was certainly involved.
‘Eh bien’, was the cheerful comment of his German colleague, Radowitz,
‘alors vous garderez votre principe et les Anglais garderont l’Egypte.’
The English did so. The only concrete result of Wolff’s convention, left
unratified by the sultan and by everyone else, was the dispatch of a
Turkish high commissioner to Cairo, with a corresponding increase in the
number of international problems which beset Baring there. Evacuation
of Egypt, like the execution of Scheherazade, was indefinitely postponed.
It was the existence of the Suez Canal that had brought the British to
Egypt: solicitude for bondholders, although a part of their attitude,
would never by itself alone have galvanised a Liberal government to such
action as it took. The Suez Canal continued to keep the British in Egypt.
The Canal Company remained a French organisation, operating under a
Turco-Egyptian charter: but everything to do with its physical property
was done beneath the diplomatic aegis of the British government. The use
by Wolseley, in his expedition of 1882, of the canal as a military base had
already attracted the attention of the powers before Granville referred to
it in his placatory circular of January 1883. In this circular, Granville
proposed that the powers should combine to declare that the canal must
remain unfortified and free to the passage of all shipping; that no troops or
munitions should be disembarked in it; and that no hostilities should take
place in the canal or in its approaches, or anywhere in Egyptian waters,
even in a case where Turkey itself was a belligerent. But these two last
conditions were not to apply to any measure which ‘might be necessary
for the defence of Egypt’. This was either meaningless or sinister, and the
powers not surprisingly thought it the latter. It was France who took the
initiative in summoning an international commission to consider the busi-
ness further, and by June 1885 an instrument had been drafted that
incorporated proposals from both Britain and France. But the British
representative tacked on a reservation, the effect of which was to suspend
the application of the clauses drawn up by the international commission
for so long as British forces occupied Egypt. In 1 888 the convention was
indeed signed by Britain, in company with France and all the powers of
Europe, but it did not become operative as Britain continued to insist on
her reservation of 1885. The stout British view, well expressed by Dilke in
the House of Commons, was that this was a ‘crazy and insane conven-
tion’, under which Russian ships might pass through the Canal on their
way to attack India. Not until the negotiation of 1904, when the French
goad was finally removed from the British side in Egypt, did the British
abandon this attitude. ‘ The freedom of the seas ’ had long been a loudly
proclaimed British interest : but the Suez Canal, though full of salt water,
could not be considered by the masters of Egypt as an international
channel.
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Thus, British power was asserted successfully, in an area where it was
essential for Britain so to assert it. The wider significance of the instruc-
tions that Salisbury had given to Lytton, when in 1876 pressure was due
to be increased upon the Amir at Kabul, was clearly illustrated. ‘Terri-
tories’, Salisbury had then written, ‘ultimately dependent on British
power for their defence must not be closed to those of the Queen’s officers
or subjects who may be duly authorised to enter them.’ Nevertheless, the
anti-imperial tradition in British political thought, always a powerful
factor in drawing back a forward policy, operated in this case, and because
there was so much unease in England about the assertion of this power
more and more was made of the ‘ duty ’ laid upon the English to stay in
Egypt for the sake of the Egyptians themselves: the fellaheen, and not the
bondholders, must become the object of imperial solicitude. Although the
Liberal party henceforward concentrated their emphasis on this aspect of
‘Cromerism’ Gladstone hi mself always denied that any such duty had
arisen, which cancelled all pledges to retire from Egypt. The government
of Egypt remained, as he characterised it in May 1893, ‘a burden, a diffi-
culty, and a risk’. The introduction of this new missionary element, how-
ever, into the British attitude towards Egypt, could only further alienate
the French, and give further argument to those who made it their business
to collect material for the record of per fide Albion.
The Central Asian complication had at least one virtue: it was a matter
within the purview of two powers only. But in Egypt everyone had a right
to have a say, and everyone said it: it was his bitter experience of listening
to its being said that caused Cromer to take particular care that in the
‘Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, which he invented for the occasion in 1899, no
rights or privileges similar to those they enjoyed in Egypt should be
acquired by foreigners. It was this common dislike of British policy in
Egypt that assisted other powers to come together, to British detriment, in
Africa, in the Far East, and indeed anywhere in the world where the
British empire had a frontier. In 1892-3, while Russian agents were pene-
trating the Pamir plateau to the north of Kashmir, the French were
advancing into Siam from their base on the Mekong in Indo-China. It
was fanciful to see this as one vast ‘pincer movement’ on India, but its
implications were alarming enough for Rosebery’s government to make
an accommodation with Russia on the Pamir question in 1895, at a speed
that no other Central Asian problem had yet had applied to it.
Other illustrations of the weakness of the British position were to be
found in the Levant itself. In December 1894, when the troubles of the
Armenians were again forcing themselves upon the unwilling attention of
the European powers, Rosebery was disposed to allow Russia to occupy
the Armenian provinces of Turkey, in return for Russian recognition of
Britain’s ‘special position’ in Egypt, and with, perhaps, some compensa-
tion for the French in Syria. So far had Britain abandoned her dogma of
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a Levantine status quo. In Asia Minor, moreover, there was a new factor
to be coped with. Since 1888, when the first train from Vienna reached
Constantinople, German companies had been interesting themselves in
the further railway development of Anatolia, and by 1892 had completed
a line from the Bosporus to Ankara. In this age, a railway was looked on
as the tentacle of the advancing imperialist octopus, and with good
reason: H. N. Brailsford was to note sardonically in his War of Steel and
Gold (1914) how railways in Anatolia meander for miles over a level plain,
making so much extra per mile for the promoter. Yet the British, so sensi-
tive on Persian railway questions, were unable to obstruct this foreign
thrust, which must inevitably take it on rails to a region where no other
imperial flag had yet been seen — the Persian Gulf. The Germans had their
position of advantage made plain to them: for when in December 1892
the British ambassador in Turkey of his own accord showed signs of
hindering further German railway schemes, Germany threatened to with-
draw support of British policy in Egypt. Cromer, his hands then full with
the intransigence of Abbas II, and anxious to get consent to an increase in
the Egyptian army, prevailed on Rosebery to see to it that there was no
further annoyance of the Germans in Anatolia. Even in their traditional
diplomatic battleground in Central Asia, England had to yield ground.
When the Russians in February 1900 abandoned the Anglo-Russian
agreement of 1873, which had contained a Russian stipulation that
Afghanistan lay outside the sphere of Russian influence, the unease
caused in ‘Anglo-Indian’ circles was deepened by the sense of bafflement
that things could come to such a pass.
The German incursion, however, set the older members of the Middle
Eastern ‘club’ a common problem. When the German emperor paid his
second visit to the Levant in October 1898, and announced in Damascus
that 300 million Muslims could count him their friend, the Russian and
the French as well as the British empire had reason to feel irritation. An
Ottoman empire revivified by German zeal would be a standing menace to
a secure future for all three. Curzon as Viceroy of India was able to induce
both the sultan of Oman and the sheikh of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf —
the latter place the likeliest terminus for any railway down the valley of the
Euphrates — to sign treaties with the Raj in which they stipulated that they
would cede no territory and receive no foreign agent without the sanction
of the British government. This they did in the first two months of 1899:
but nevertheless, it was in November of that year that the sultan granted
his formal approval of a concession to a German company to build a
railway across his empire to Baghdad and Basra.
Thus, as this period in Middle Eastern history closed, it appeared to be
to the interest of both Russia and Great Britain to decide whether to make
an individual accommodation with Germany, or to come to an accom-
modation with each other. Nothing could now be done in the Middle
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East unless each power kept open its line to Berlin; and as it turned out,
neither St Petersburg nor London had anything to offer Berlin that made
the Germans think it worth their while to keep this line in repair. The
British, although painfully slow to take the measure of this problem, did
finally make their move. Having countered any menace to the Far
Eastern status quo by the alliance with Japan, which included a reciprocal
recognition of each power’s ‘ special positions ’ in Korea and in India, they
were successful in restoring the entente with France (1904), receiving at
last the French recognition of the British ‘special position’ in Egypt in
return for approval of the establishment of French paramountcy in
Morocco. (This was done, in extreme unwisdom, without German co-
operation.) Three years later, another British government came to terms
on Central Asia with France’s ally, Russia (1907).
This meant that, to keep their stance in Egypt, the British in effect were
prepared to jettison their traditional foreign policy of non-commitment
to any European bloc. As a natural result, they ended by entering a war in
1914, whose primary cause was an Austro-Russian quarrel of a kind that
had never previously concerned Whitehall, at the side of those who had
for so long been the rivals of their own imperial power in the Middle East.
Nor was there any reason for the British to suppose, in 1914, that the
French and the Russians would not take up these roles again.
But since, at the turn of the century, they were African and Far Eastern
questions that held the attention of European chancelleries and public
opinion alike, the Middle East fell out of sight while Cromer continued to
present his annual reports on Egypt to the British Parliament. Arthur
Balfour was able to hold to his opinion, first expressed in 1896, that a
defeat of the Indian army on the Indus would be a trifling disaster for
India and the British empire in comparison with a defeat of the fleet in the
English Channel. The danger in South Africa passed, and Tsar Nicholas II
did not in fact order the mobilisation of his troops in Turkestan: the
British empire took heart again, and promoted the Royal Navy to an
even higher place in its collective esteem. But whatever other preoccupa-
tions came, and wherever else Europe extended its frontiers, the security
of the entire Middle Eastern bridgehead between the continents remained
a vital matter for every power with extra-European interests. The Middle
East was therefore to remain, in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth,
an area where outsiders had the greatest say. That ‘active Arab sovereign’
whose emergence Palmerston had feared was not yet in sight: but his
eventual arrival on the scene would, while complicating it, make no
difference to the essential issue that confronted the great powers of the
world.
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CHAPTER XXII
THE PARTITION OF AFRICA
S ince the nineteenth century began, the Europeans had been
strengthening their hold over those parts of the world selected during
the era of mercantilism. Australasia, India, South-east Asia, above
all the Americas — they were either temperate regions peopled with white
immigrants or tropical countries already under white rule. Step by step
the mode of white expansion had altered : liberalism and industrial growth
shifted the emphasis away from colonies of formal empire to regions of
informal influence. But whatever the form it had taken, the groundwork
of European imperialism had been truly laid long before the cartographical
exercises in partition at the end of the century. Africa was the last con-
tinent to win the interest of the strategists of expansion; it seemed to them
that here they were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Dividing Africa was easy enough for the Europeans. They did it at that
moment in history when their lead over the other continents was at its
longest. Economic growth and technical innovation gave them in-
vincible assurance and force. Their culture and political organisation
gave them a carrying power to match their iron ships and high-velocity
guns. That Europe had the capacity to subjugate Africa was self-evident;
but had her rulers any firm wish to do so?
Twenty years were enough to see the continent carved into symmetries
devised by the geometers of diplomacy. By the end of the century only
Morocco and Ethiopia were still independent, and their turn was coming.*
But the statesmen who drew the new frontier lines did not do so because
they wanted to rule and develop these countries. Bismarck and Ferry,
Gladstone and Salisbury, had no solid belief in African empire; indeed
they sneered at the movement as something of a farce. A gamble in jungles
and bush might interest a poor king such as Leopold II of the Belgians,
or a politician on the make such as Crispi, but the chief partitioners of the
1880’s glimpsed no grand imperial idea behind what they were doing. They
felt no need of African colonies and in this they reflected the indifference
of all but the lunatic fringe of European business and politics. Here their
historians must follow them. For all the hindsight of social scientists,
there was no comprehensive cause or purpose behind it. In all the long
annals of imperialism, the partition of Africa is a remarkable freak. Few
events that have thrown an entire continent into revolution have been
brought about so casually.
Why then did statesmen bother to divide the continent? It used to be
supposed that European society must have put out stronger urges to
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empire in Africa at this time; and all sorts of causes have been suggested
to support the supposition. One and all, however, they suffer from a tire-
some defect: of powerful new incentives there is remarkably little sign.
Only after the partition was long over and done with did capital seek
outlets, did industry seek markets in tropical Africa. As late as the end
of the century the European economy went on by-passing these poor
prospects in favour of the proven fields of America and Asia. Neither is
it realistic to explain the movement by some change in the temper of the
European mind. The pride and pomps of African empire did not suit the
popular taste until late in the i890’s when the partition was all but
completed. Only after Africa lay divided and allotted did European
opinion embrace the mythology of empire. Defined as a movement of
white men to transform African society, as they had transformed the
societies of India or Java, imperialism was not the cause of partition. It
was one of the side effects.
This is not to say that there is no rational explanation. It is only to
suggest that no single, general cause underlay a movement to which so
many things contributed at random. All of them must be included, for it
was their concatenations that brought on the partition. And these cannot
be revealed unless the view is wrenched away from the standpoint that has
obscured it hitherto. Scanning Europe for the causes, the theorists of
imperialism have been looking for the answers in the wrong places. The
crucial changes that set all working took place in Africa itself. It was the
fall of an old power in its north, the rise of a new in its south, that dragged
Africa into modem history.
From these internal crises, erupting at opposite ends of the continent,
there unfolded two unconnected processes of partition. That in southern
Africa flowed from the rise of the Transvaal on its gold reefs, from a
struggle between colonial and republican expansion that reached from
Bechuanaland to Lake Nyasa. It eventually drove South Africa into the
Jameson Raid and the Boer War. The second crisis was the breakdown
of the Khedivate in the Egyptian revolution of 1879-82. Their misdealings
with this new proto-nationalism brought the British stumbling on to the
Nile and trapped them there. This was crucial. It led to bad blood between
them and the French in a quarrel that was to spread over all tropical
Africa before being settled at Fashoda in 1898.
Hence Europe became entangled in tropical Africa by two internal
crises. Imbroglios with Egyptian proto-nationalists and thence with
Islamic revivals across the whole of the Sudan drew the powers into an
expansion of their own in East and West Africa. Thousands of miles to
the south, English efforts to compress Afrikaner nationalists into an
obsolete imperial design set off a second sequence of expansion in southern
Africa. The last quarter of the century has often been called the ‘Age of
imperialism’. Yet much of this imperialism was no more than an in-
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THE PARTITION OF AFRICA
voluntary reaction of Europe to the various proto-nationalisms of Islam
that were already rising in Africa against the encroaching thraldom of the
white men.
Muslim rebellion drew Ferry into the unplanned occupation of Tunis
which was the prelude of the partition; Muslim revolution in Cairo drew
Gladstone into his Egyptian bondage and set off the partition proper.
The peoples of this part of North Africa had much to protest about. By
1880 consuls, money-lenders, engineers and philanthropists from over
the water had organised both these countries into chaos. Since Egypt
commanded a route to British India, since Tunis counted in French
Mediterranean policy both the khedive and the bey had been playthings
of Anglo-French expansion for three-quarters of a century. Although
neither power could be indifferent to the fate of these areas, neither
wished to turn them into colonies. Anxious to keep the Ottoman empire
intact, the British chose to watch over Suez from Constantinople. Enjoy-
ing the fruits of unofficial hegemony in Tunis and Cairo, the French felt
no desire for another Algeria. But European investment and trade had
increased since the i83o’s and it was from investment that the crash came
in the 1870’s, that golden age of Islamic insolvency when the Commander
of the Faithful at Constantinople was himself hammered into bankruptcy.
In Cairo and Tunis the financial advice of Europe hardened into something
like dictation. Debt commissioners took charge of the revenues so blithely
mortgaged by their rulers; payment of the coupon became the first charge
on their governments; in the eyes of their peoples the two potentates had
become mere debt collectors for the infidels. Inevitably they went from
financial catastrophe to political disaster. Their armies, as the least rigid
and most westernised group in these states, threatened a putsch ; or the
tribes of the marches talked of revolt. The more they squeezed money from
landlord and peasant, the nearer came revolt against their rapacity. By
1881 Egypt and Tunisia were sliding into the ruin which overtook almost
all the non-European polities in the nineteenth century that essayed a
programme of European-style development. Islam provided neither the
law nor the ethos nor the institutions for such work, and the rulers
discovered that they could not modernise without loosing their authority
or their independence.
In spite of the bankruptcy, the French were far from anxious to occupy
Tunisia. But with Italian encouragement after 1877 the grand peculator,
Mustapha ben Ismail, replaced Kheredine, the tool of France, as first
minister and set about rooting up the concessions which gave Paris the
option over the economic and political future of the country. Here was a
new situation. Making good these options would require more than
gunboats and peddlers of contracts.
Many in Algeria, but few in France, called for a punitive expedition.
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There were admirals and generals who looked forward to adding Tunis
to their domain in Algeria, there was rubbing of hands among speculators
at the prospect of the coup de Bourse which would come if their govern-
ment ended by guaranteeing the debts of a defeated bey. But most French
politicians saw more risk than gain. ‘An expedition to Tunis in an election
year?’, the premier. Ferry, exclaimed to his Foreign Minister. ‘My dear
Saint-Hilaire, you cannot think of it! ’ But Gambetta, the President of the
Chamber, was for intervention, and this was decisive. Assured of his aid,
the government at last unleashed the army. On 22 April 1881 the military
promenade into Tunisia began.
How large were the French intentions? They were remarkably small for
the so-called age of imperialism. Gambetta, defining the expedition’s
aims, wrote: ‘We ought to extort a large reparation from the bey. . .take
a large belt of territory as a precaution for the future, sign a treaty with
effective guarantees, and then retire. . .after having made a show of force
sufficient to assure for ever a preponderant position there, in keeping
with our power, our interests and our investments in the Mediterranean.’
With Ferry also, the aim was to reassert external sway rather than to
acquire a new colony and these limited aims were mirrored in the Treaty
of Bardo, extorted from the bey on 12 May 1881. It merely announced a
French protectorate. By itself this meant only long-range control of his
external relations; and even so mild a commitment as this was ratified in
the Chamber with a hundred and twenty abstentions. The French occu-
pation of Tunisia was not a matter of forward policy-making in Paris. It
came in response to the deepening crisis inside Tunisia itself. The Treaty
of Bardo was merely an arrangement with a discredited Muslim ruler
whose surrender to France could not bind his subjects.
Within his kingdom, as in Algeria, preachers of the Sanusi religious
order were whipping up rage against the Christian invaders; a rebellion
in Oran was followed by another in the south around the holy city of
Kairouan. Holy war was proclaimed, a Khalifa was recognised, the tribes
farthest from Tunis flocked to join the movement. Here in essence was the
same situation as that which had produced the savage wars of Abd-el-
Kader in Algeria during the 1840’s and was to produce the Muslim
theocracy of the Mahdi in the Egyptian Sudan — lightning explosions of
fanaticism against the overlordship of the foreigner and the unbeliever.
Crushing the rising offered no difficulties to the generals, but it presented
thorny problems to the politicians. One thing was now clear. The basis
of the old system of informal control had gone for good, swept aside by
political and religious revolt from below. By the summer of 1881 France
had to make the same hard choice in Tunisia as Abd-el-Kader had presented
her with in Algeria. She had either to get on or get out. Either the paper
protectorate had to be made good, or it had to be tom up. Making it good
would entail yet more criticism from the Chamber. In October the rebellion
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was broken. But the general dislike of African adventures in the Chamber
meant that its endorsement would be oblique and ambiguous. Gambetta
induced the new Chamber to resolve on the ‘complete fulfilment’ of the
Treaty of Bardo. Behind this dexterously vague draftsmanship, the reality
was quite different. The invaders of Tunisia were now compelled to con-
quer and rule a people whom they could no longer dominate from outside.
So devious an occupation was far from marking the start of a new
imperialism. It was not the result of a profound impulse in French society
to enlarge the empire in Africa. It was electorally risky. It brought
obloquy upon its sponsors. It struck no spark of that Gallic love of
gloire so often brought in by historians when the problems surrounding
French expansion become too puzzling. The protectorate was no more
than a continuation of the old move into Algeria, a conclusion of the old
informal expansion into Tunisia.
The partition of the African tropics which began two years later was
not the result of the Tunisian mishap, or of Leopold’s schemes and
Bismarck’s wiles, or of the squabbles of white merchants and explorers
on the spot. What drove it on was the Suez crisis and the repercussions of
that crisis.
A recognisably modern nationalist revolution was sweeping the Nile
Delta by 1882; its leaders are much more familiar figures today than the
pro-consuls who put them down. The Egyptians were reacting against
increasing interference over the past six years by Britain and France.
Anxious to renovate the crumbling state on which their amicable dual
paramountcy and their security in India and the Mediterranean in large
part depended, they had acted with a high hand. At their behest, the
Khedivate had been clothed in the decencies of constitutional monarchy,
the army cut, and the landlords obliged to pay their dues; the khedive
Ismail had been sent packing, Tewfik raised in his place and two-thirds of
the revenue sequestrated to satisfy the bondholders. Small wonder that
the Notables were using the constitution to break their foreign fetters.
The mulcted peasantry was at the point of revolt. Muslim gorges were
rising against Christians; the army had mutinied to recall dismissed
comrades, and the pashas were defending their fiscal privileges in the guise
of patriots ridding the country of the foreigner. By January 1882 all were
uniting against the Anglo-French Financial Controllers and the khedive
who did their will. The French consul reported that Tewfik had lost all
prestige; the British that Arabi and his colonels had practically taken over
the country.
What was afoot in Egypt was far more serious than the collapse of the
bey had been. Here also was ‘an anti-European movement. . .destined
to turn into fanaticism’; 1 but this time it had the professional army at its
1 French consul in Cairo to Freycinet, 21 February 1882: Archives du Minist£re des
Affaires Ftrang^res [henceforth, A.E.], figypte 72.
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head. Gladstone, then prime minister, anticipated ‘ with the utmost appre-
hension a conflict between the “ Control ” and any sentiment truly national,
with a persuasion that one way or the other we should come to grief.’
‘Egypt for the Egyptians [was] the best, the only good solution to the
Egyptian question.’ This was true. But as the ‘union between [Britain
and France] on that . . . question was the principal symbol ’ of their overall
entente, both gave priority in the crisis to keeping in step. Each might
grumble at going it together, neither desired to go it alone. The unpopu-
larity of the Tunisian adventure was enough to deter Freycinet’s ministry
from another promenade in North Africa. Gladstone’s Liberals, who
had just retired from the Transvaal and Afghanistan and washed their
hands of Tunis and Morocco, still had their scruples about meddling
abroad. Yet something had to be done. Clearly the ideal solution, the
only one as Gladstone had said, was to come to terms with Arabi. This
was tried. Paris offered him a paid holiday to study European armies;
London tried to reconcile him to the khedive. But Egyptian feelings were
too heated for Arabi to agree to the one condition that seemed indispens-
able: abiding by the Financial Control. So long as he refused this, the
British feared a foreign thrust at the jugular vein of Suez, and the French
feared Turkish intervention which would bring the aid of Islam nearer to
their dissident subjects in Tunis and Algeria. On 6 January 1882 the joint
note announced the conclusion of Gambetta, unwillingly subscribed to
by Gladstone. The khedive must be supported and the Control upheld.
What was not announced was the equally emphatic conviction of the two
governments that landing an army in Egypt for this purpose would defeat
its own object. Freycinet could not move because the Chamber was
opposed, and so an invasion would hand Egypt to the British on a plate.
Gladstone’s cabinet too was in a dilemma. Intervening single-handed
would mean a breach with France. A joint invervention would give
France a half-share in the route to the East. Granville at the Foreign
Office listed the objections : ‘ Opposition of Egyptians ; of Turkey ; jealousy
of Europe; responsibility of governing a country of Orientals without
adequate means and under adverse circumstances ; presumption that France
would object as much to our sole occupation as we should object to
theirs. ’ The official case against going into Egypt was overwhelming. As
Disraeli had said, ‘Constantinople [was still] the key to India, not Cairo
and the Canal’. At few times in the century had Anglo-French rivalry
in the Mediterranean been so composed. Added to that, the late-Victorian
pessimism about the possibilities of making English gentlemen of ‘ Orientals ’
made another strong argument against conquering new Indias. All the
plans therefore were for staying out and solving the problem from outside.
But effective as the arts of ‘ moral influence ’ had been hitherto in bending
pashas and mandarins to European whims, they were to prove worse than
useless against Arabists, Mahdists and Boxers whose mass defiance
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signalled the political awakenings of Islam and the Orient. Instead of
sobering the colonels and saving the Control, the pressures of gunboat
diplomacy and the European Concert only added to the charismatic appeal
of Arabi, el Misr, the ‘ Egyptian The Anglo-French naval demonstration
of June provoked a massacre of Europeans at Alexandria. This destroyed
Arabi’s credit with the English Liberals, and although the French squadron
sailed away, Beauchamp Seymour was allowed to bombard the Alex-
andrian forts to show that Britain at least was in earnest. This old-fashioned
device proved the critical blunder, the point of no return. Arabi proclaimed
a jihad against the British, rioting spread to the interior. According to
the dogmas of strategy, if Suez was in jeopardy, it must be protected at
any cost. According to Anglo-Indian orthodoxy, the jihad challenged
imperial prestige throughout the Muslim East. Hence for Gladstone’s
ministers, ‘the question [was] no longer what form of intervention is. . .
most unobjectionable, but in what form it can be most promptly applied’.
No chance of French or international co-operation was left. But in apply-
ing their conventional routine of threat and bluff to cow the Egyptians,
the British had raised the stakes so high that now they had to win by any
means. On 16 August Sir Garnet Wolseley and the redcoats landed on
the Canal for another small colonial war. They routed the Egyptian army
at Tel el Kebir, imprisoned Arabi and reinstated Tewfik. Gladstone’s
government pledged its word that as soon as the Canal was safe and Tewfik
strong, it would bring the troops home and leave the Egyptians * to manage
their own affairs’.
There is no doubt that this is what the Liberals meant to do. Like
the French in Tunisia, they simply intended to restore the old security
through influence without extending their rule. The expedition was to be
a Palmerstonian stroke of the kind that had brought the Turk to reason
in 1839-41, had chastened the Chinese in two Opium wars, the Ethiopians
in 1869 and the Ashanti in 1874. Many months passed before they
realised that, having rushed in, they could not rush out again; that they
had achieved the occupation which above all they had wanted to avoid.
By 1884 they had to confess privately that ‘the theory on which we origin-
ally undertook [to go in]. . .however plausible, has completely broken
down’. The models for intervention proved as outdated as the Crystal
Palace. From start to finish the British had miscalculated. They had gone
to restore the status quo ante Arabi, and discovered that it no longer
existed. They had come to restore a khedive and found him a cypher
without the authority of British bayonets. And so they had gone in and
they could not get out.
What first opened their eyes was another crisis in Africa. After Mehemet
Ali had conquered the eastern Sudan for Egypt, the khedive Ismail had
laid heavy tribute upon its people. At the same time, he had put down the
slave trade, thus depriving them of their chief means of staving off the
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tax-collector or his bastinado. He had employed white governors to
impose Christian ethics on his Muslim subjects. Detesting the imperialism
of Cairo, the Sudanese struck back at the Egyptians once they had been
disarmed by revolution and invasion. As so often in Muslim Africa, the
liberation movement took the form of a puritan revolution against the
religious latitudinarianism of the foreign ruling class. In 1881 the Mahdi,
Mohammed Ahmad, began his preaching and the revivalist Dervish
orders forged the politically discontented sheikhs and deposed sultans,
slave traders and tribes, into an army and a state. At first the implications
of the Mahdia were hidden from the British in Egypt behind a curtain of
sands, until news came in November 1883 that the Mahdists had cut the
Egyptian troops in the Sudan to pieces. Without soldiers or money,
Tewfik could not hold Khartoum. There was no resistance left between the
Mahdi and Wadi Haifa. Just as the British were handing back Tewfik a
much qualified independence and withdrawing their troops from Cairo,
the Mahdi’s advance compelled them to stand in defence of the frontiers
of Lower Egypt. At last the sinister truth dawned in London. As ministers
complained: ‘we have now been forced into the position of being the
protectors of Egypt’. As with Arabi, so with the Mahdi, there was no
chance of striking a bargain of the old mid-Victorian sort. Against
fierce Egyptian opposition Gladstone ordered Tewfik to abandon the
Sudan and stop the drain on his exchequer, while Gordon was sent to his
death at Khartoum attempting the impossible. In enforcing the abandon-
ment, Baring practically had to take control of the khedivial government
and, the tighter he gripped it, the deeper the British became involved in
its financial difficulties. By this time the unpopularity of the Egyptian
fiasco matched that of the Tunisian affair in France. It was increasingly
clear that Gladstone’s ministry had made fools of themselves. They had
hoped to set up an independent Egyptian government; but hampered by
the Mahdia, the loss of the Sudan, the bankruptcy and the Control’s
unpopularity with the proto-nationalists, they found no Egyptian collab-
orators to whom they could transfer power with safety. Nor could they
retire so long as the infuriated French refused to admit the exclusive
paramountcy in Cairo which they claimed as their due reward. For if they
left, the French would upset their influence, or the Egyptian nationalists
or Sudanese invaders might upset the financial settlement, and all the
dangers of the Suez crisis would arise again.
In the event, the Mahdia had trapped the British in Egypt in much the
same way as the southern rising had caught the French in Tunisia. No
sooner did a European power set its foot upon the neck of the Ottoman
rulers of the coastal cities than the nomads of the inland steppes and
deserts seized their chance of throwing off the pashas’ yoke. Hence the
Europeans found the regimes which they had come to discipline or
restore falling about their ears and they had to stay and pick up the
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pieces. Gladstone wearily summed up the result of dealing as if they were
politically uninhabited with an Egypt in revolution and a Sudan in religious
revival: ‘we have done our Egyptian business; we are an Egyptian
government.’
The longer the British garrisons remained, the stronger grew the argu-
ments for staying. By 1 889 the ‘ veiled protectorate ’ had become a necessity
for imperial security in the world. As Salisbury said, ‘the appetite had
grown with the eating’. Sir Evelyn Baring and the Anglo-Indian officials
who governed in the name of the khedive, brought from Calcutta to the
Nile their professional distrust of nationalists. It became inconceivable
that the Egyptians could be trusted to govern themselves. Arabist senti-
ment still smouldered. In taking over the country, the English had stopped
its politics in a state of betwixt and between. Its obsolete Turkish rulers
had fallen, but its rising liberal leaders had been put down. So Baring
had to rule until native authority revived, but native authority could
hardly revive while Baring ruled. If evacuation was impossible for internal
reasons, it soon became impracticable on external grounds. Eventually
the occupation drove France into the arms of Russia; and this combined
menace in the Mediterranean, together with the further crumbling of
Turkish power, enhanced Egypt’s importance to Britain. After 1889
therefore, the resolution was to stay and keep the lid on the simmering
revolution, rather than withdraw and invite another power to straddle
the road to India. Henceforth England’s statesmen were to be bewitched
with the far-fetched fancies of the Nile-valley strategy. To be sure of the
canal and lower Egypt, they were to push their territorial claims up the Nile
to Fashoda and from the Indian Ocean to Uganda and the Bahr-al-Ghazal.
On an Olympian view, the taking of Egypt might seem to have been the
logical outcome of two great movements of European expansion since the
end of the eighteenth century. One was the long build-up of British trade
and power in the East; the other was the extension of Anglo-French
influence which had so thoroughly disrupted Ottoman rule in Egypt and
the Levant that the routes to the East were no longer safe. Certainly this
long-term logic set limits to the problem. But what determined the
occupation of Egypt in concrete terms was not so much the secular processes
of European expansion as the Arabist and Mahdist revolutions against
its encroaching mastery. When they baffled the customary informal
techniques of France and Britain, it was too late to find any other solution
but conquest and rule.
The shots of Seymour at Alexandria and Wolseley at Tel el Kebir were
to echo round the world. It transpired in the end that their ricochets had
blown Africa into the modem age. The onslaught on Arabi opened the
long Anglo-French conflict over Egypt which more than anything brought
on the division of East and West Africa. Up to the 1890’s it was merely
a partition on paper. The politicians in the European capitals at least
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intended it to go no farther than that. Hitherto they had ignored the
clamour of their merchants, missionaries and explorers for advances in
tropical Africa. They had done so with good reason. Communications
were difficult ; the tribes of the hinterlands seemed lost in chaos ; there were
grave doubts whether the African could be persuaded to work, or whether
he could work at anything worth producing; prospects of trade or revenue
seemed gloomy indeed. If governments had sometimes bestirred themselves
to help private traders and sent frigates along the coasts to atone for the
sins of the slave trade, such acts were not intended as commitments. Since
large or stable authorities were few and far between, even the simplest
methods of informal expansion worked badly in tropical Africa. Clearly
then, this was no place for colonies. For decades before 1882, therefore,
a gentlemen’s agreement between the powers saw to it that the petty quarrels
of their merchants and officials on the coasts did not become pretexts for
empire.
But when Gladstone stumbled into Egypt that era ended. To the French,
the veiled protectorate was the worst humiliation since Sedan. Their
canal and the country which they had nursed since Napoleon’s landing
had been snatched away under their very noses. This broke the Liberal
entente and kept Britain and France at odds for twenty years. Once in
Egypt, moreover, Britain became highly vulnerable to continental
diplomacy. To set Egyptian finances in order, she needed German support
against French vetoes in the Debt Commission, if her ministers were to
avoid asking their critical Parliament to subsidise the khedive. By
altering European alignments thus, the Egyptian occupation for the rest
of the century gave the powers both incentive and opportunity to break
the traditional understandings about tropical Africa. While Baring played
the puppet-master in Cairo, the French sought to force him out by loosing
their pro-consuls against exposed British interests in unclaimed Africa;
while the Germans did likewise to extort more British aid in their European
affairs. Once the powers began to back their nationals’ private enter-
prises for diplomatic purposes, commerce south of the Sahara ceased to be a
matter of restricted influence over coasts ; it became a business of unlimited
territorial claims over vast hinterlands. In this roundabout fashion,
Arabi’s revolution and Gladstone’s blunder exaggerated the importance
of intrinsically tiny disputes in tropical Africa and brought the diplo-
matists to the auction rooms.
On the western coasts before October 1882 there were few signs that
the modus vivendi was to end so abruptly. Wars between producers and
middlemen chiefs along the unpacified lines of supply were strangling the
British and French trading stations on the Bight of Benin. For twenty
years past, the Colonial Office had been thinking of giving up the Gambia,
the Gold Coast, Lagos and Sierra Leone. The French government had
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left the Ivory Coast and in 1880 it was thinking of moving out of Dahomey
and Gabon ‘ because of the trivial scale of French interests there V With
the turmoil in the hinterlands, the unofficial pax rigged up by the palm-oil
traders was ceasing to work; but London and Paris refused to replace it
with the extravagant order of colonial rule.
The only regions where Europeans had broken through the middlemen
chiefs who closed all ways inland, had been along the three great rivers.
On the Senegal by 1865 General Faidherbe had carried French influence
up-river to Kayes. Sixteen years later their men in the field had visions
of going on to bring the formidable Muslim states of the western Sudan
under their sway and of building a trans-Saharan railway between Senegal
and Algeria. This scheme went back into a pigeon-hole. In 1 88 1 , however,
an Upper Senegal Command was formed and Colonel Borgnis-Desbordes
was instructed to throw a chain of posts from Bafoulabe to Bamako on
the Upper Niger. But as soon as the soldiers ran into trouble, the politicians
of Paris cut their credits and talked of scrapping the command. The states-
men in London and Paris refused to quarrel about this expansion of
Senegal which pointed no threat to the chief centre of British trade three
thousand kilometres away on the Lower Niger.
Nor were there the makings of a West African ‘scramble’ here, where
Liverpool merchants throve without the aid of colonial government.
By 1881 George Goldie had amalgamated the most enterprising of the
Niger firms into the National Africa Company, the better to monopolise
the up-river traffic and drive out French competitors. This was Anglo-
French rivalry of a sort, but only at the level of private traders cutting
each others’ throats in the ordinary way of business. So long as the Anglo-
French entente lasted, their governments had no wish to become involved,
as Goldie discovered when he was refused a royal charter for his company.
They were as uninterested in the merchants and explorers jostling in the
no-man’s-land along the Congo river. Disraeli’s ministers had rejected
the Cameron treaties which offered them a political option on the inner
basin. Leopold II of the Belgians was to be more reckless. Under cover
of the International African Association which he floated in 1876, this
inveterate projector was plotting a private Congo empire under the
innocent device of a free state. In 1879 Stanley went out to establish its
claims. To preserve a hinterland for its poverty-stricken posts on the Gabon,
the French government asked Brazza to pick up counter-treaties that
would ‘reserve our rights without engaging the future’. All this was but
the small change of local rivalry that had gone on for decades. Brazza’s
was a private venture of passing interest to his government. Leopold’s
Congo scheme had as little chance of being realised as a dozen others he
1 Minister of Marine to Foreign Minister, 6 January 1 874, A.E., M&noires et Documents,
Afrique (henceforth, A.E.M.D.), 58. Foreign Minister to Minister of Marine, 31 January
1880, A.E.M.D. Afrique, 77.
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had hatched for concessions in China, the Philippines, Borneo and the
Transvaal. The Belgian government would have nothing to do with it.
Nor, as the king admitted, would investors subscribe a centime until
the powers recognised his rights in the Congo. But what was the chance
that they would then be so generous as to endow his house with a great
estate which he was too puny to seize for himself? As long as France and
Britain could agree, his hopes of becoming an African emperor were
exceedingly thin.
But immediately the British ejected the French from the Dual Control
in October 1882, these minor intrigues in West Africa were drawn into
their quarrel over Egypt. In Paris there was less talk of jettisoning out-
posts and more speculation about extending claims to strengthen the
diplomatic hand against the English. Treich Laplene was allowed to
expand French influence on the Ivory Coast. More important, the
French consul on the Lower Niger started a flurry of treaty-making,
menacing the chief British trade on the coast. Early in 1883 Granville
tried to renew the old self-denial arrangements by offering the French
exclusive influence on the Upper Niger if they would respect the status quo
on the lower river. But the time for such happy understandings had gone.
As the ambassador reported, the breaking of the Egyptian gentlemen’s-
agreement had so outraged the French that a West African standstill was
now out of the question. So by November the Foreign Office could see
nothing for it but to send out consul Hewett to bring the Niger districts
under treaties of protection and ‘prevent the possibility of our trade there
being interfered with’. His sailing was delayed for six months. Neither
the Treasury nor the Liverpool traders could be persuaded to pay his fare!
At the same time, the Anglo-French estrangement overturned the hands-
off arrangements on the Congo. Paris scorned Granville’s efforts to renew
them. In November 1882 the Chamber ratified Brazza’s treaty of claim to
the right bank of the river instead. A month later, Granville countered
by accepting Portugal’s ancient claims to the Congo in return for
guarantees of free trade. To the French this treaty seemed West African
insult added to Egyptian injury; ‘a security taken by Britain to prevent
France. . .from setting foot in the Congo Delta’; a violation of an under-
taking that went back to 1786. In riposte, Ferry mounted a diplomatic
onslaught against the Anglo-Portuguese agreement. Once she had obtained
a pre-emptive right over Leopold’s holdings, France pressed the counter-
claims of the Congo Free State as if they were already her own. At the
end of March 1884 the most powerful statesman in Europe took a hand.
His own metaphor for it was much more revealing: he would take up his
‘Egyptian baton’.
With Egypt dividing them, France and Britain both courted German
favour; Granville needed Bismarck’s help to extricate his government
from their financial troubles in Cairo; while Ferry solicited it in resisting
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the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty and English ambitions in Egypt — ‘a con-
sideration which dominated all others’ in Paris. The Chancellor could
sell his support to the highest bidder; or if need be, he could encourage
the weaker contender against the stronger, and so keep the Egyptian issue
from being settled. In any case there would be something for Germany;
Heligoland might be recovered from England; a number of colonial
trifles could certainly be picked up ; better still, an isolated France might
be diverted from allying with Russia or rejoining Britain into a healing
rapprochement with the conquerors of Alsace-Lorraine. In March
Bismarck began to try out these ideas. He hinted at German help for
France if she pressed her rights in Egypt. But Ferry, suspecting that
Bismarck did ‘not want to do anything to annoy England, but. . .[would]
be delighted to see her opposed by others, especially by [France], nego-
tiated an Egyptian agreement with Britain. In June the English were
promising to evacuate the country in 1888, if the French would agree to
neutralise it on Belgian lines thereafter.
With the Egyptian baton falling from his grasp, it was time for Bismarck
to stiffen the French with offers of German support, if they would raise
their terms to Granville. Time also to remove Ferry’s suspicions by proving
that Germany had serious reasons of her own to act with France against
Britain. There were none in Egypt, as the Chancellor had often declared.
So for verisimilitude, he blew the petty Anglo-German trade disputes
around the African coasts into a noisy anti-British demonstration. In
May he pressed the German government’s protection over Liideritz’s
concession at Angra Pequena, on the barren south-west coast of Africa.
A month later, he denounced the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty and demanded
an international conference to decide the Congo’s future. At the beginning
of July he proclaimed Togoland and the Cameroons to be German pro-
tectorates. There was no popular cry for African colonies inside the Reich;
and as Bismarck always insisted, he himself was 4 against colonies . . . which
install officials and erect garrisons ’. But paper claims to protectorates cost
nothing, and they were good bait to draw France away from Britain into
an entente with Germany. Surprisingly, this devious diplomacy succeeded.
At the London Conference of July, Bismarck, together with the French
Chamber and bondholders, contrived to wreck the Anglo-French agree-
ment over Egypt. To drive the wedge home, he proposed a Franco-
German entente on West African questions. In August the French
accepted. 4 After the bad treatment inflicted on us by England’, wrote de
Courcel, 4 this rapprochement is essential to us under penalty of utter and
most dangerous isolation.’ To show good faith, the Germans joined France
in backing Leopold’s Congo Free State. By October 1884 the two powers
had agreed to settle the fate of the Niger as well as the Congo at an inter-
national conference in Berlin; and the British, who had conceded all
Bismarck’s African claims and dropped the Portuguese treaty lest ‘a
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breach with Germany . . . make our chances of honourable extrication from
the Egyptian difficulty even less than they are’, were compelled to attend.
To strengthen their governments’ hands in the coming negotiations,
consuls and merchants were now treaty-making wherever they hoped to
trade on the west coast. Astonished ministers in London observed that
‘the attention of European Powers is directed to an unprecedented extent
to... the formation of Settlements on the African coast’. Forestalled
by Nachtigal in the Cameroons, Hewett rushed around the Niger Delta
bringing the chiefs under British protection to block the Germans and
French there. On the Lower Niger, Goldie bought out the Compagnie du
Senegal and the Societe frangaise de VAfrique Equatoriale, and sent Joseph
Thomson to outrun a German expedition for treaties with the northern
Nigerian emirates of Sokoto and Gandu. Meanwhile, the French, who
had no great hopes of the Lower Niger, were advancing down the upper
river from Bamako, occupied by Gallieni in 1883, and were extending then-
treaties along the Ivory and Slave Coasts. Governments had let the local
expansionists off their leashes, now that the Egyptian occupation had
merged territorial claims in Africa with power-politics in Europe. How
high the symbolic importance of these trivial African clashes had risen
was shown when the French and English went meekly to their little Canossa
at Berlin. The two leading naval and colonial powers in the world were
bidding for West African commerce under the hammer of a third-rate
naval person who hitherto had had no colonies at all.
In strange contrast to the zealots on the coasts, the statesmen who met
in Berlin at the end of 1884 found each other reasonably accommodating.
The conference in fact was something of an anti-climax. Before it had
ever met, it had served its main purposes. The Egyptian baton had
thwacked Gladstone back into line. The Franco-German entente had
been formed; and it had kept Granville from declaring a protectorate in
Egypt and from taking exclusive charge of its finances. Toward the end
of the meeting, indeed, Ferry and Granville were agreeing in the London
Convention to pump an international loan into the Khedivate and to
continue international control of its revenues. Though they were left
pining for the British to leave Cairo, the French had at least prevented them
from digging-in any deeper. Hence the West African disputes which had
served as outer markers for these evolutions of grand diplomacy were
easily dismissed in Berlin. And public opinion in Europe took scant
notice of the manner of their going.
The diplomats dealt briskly enough with the outstanding trivia. Who
should be saddled with the responsibility for free trade and navigation
on the Niger; and on the Congo? How little the powers cared, they
showed by recognising the legal personality of the Congo Free State.
It was Leopold’s year for a miracle. The lions agreed to toss him the
lion’s share of the Congo basin, while contenting themselves with the
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scraps. Ferry took for France a much more modest sphere; the region
around Brazzaville on the north bank was to be the Gabon’s hinterland.
For the rest, the Congo river was placed under an international regime
and its conventional basin, covering most of Central Africa, became a
free-trade area. Having conceded the Congo, Granville was able to keep
international authority out of the Niger. Control of the lower river went
to Britain, that of the upper river to France, arrangements which merely
preserved the status quo. Though the Berlin Act laid it down that terri-
torial claims on African coasts should depend on effective occupation,
this magical phrase was left so vague that it meant almost nothing.
Far from laying down ground rules for the occupation of Africa, the
statesmen at Berlin had no intention of playing that game. Despising
colonial ventures in tropical Africa, they had extended their hands-off
arrangements largely in order to avoid it. The last thing they wanted was
to commit themselves to administering such comparatively unimportant
places. Once these countries had been saved from foreign clutches by
adjusting their international status, the diplomats planned to wash then-
hands of them. Except in the Cameroons and Togoland, where the
traders refused such gifts, Bismarck gave over his paper protectorates to
the Germans trafficking in them. The British hastened to do the same with
the Lower Niger. In June 1886 Goldie at last got his monopoly chartered
under the title of the Royal Niger Company ; this was ‘ the cheapest . . . way
of meeting’ the obligations accepted at the Berlin Conference. Until 1891
the Foreign Office hoped to saddle the Liverpool firms with the governance
of the Niger Delta, just as it had fobbed on to Goldie the costs of adminis-
tering the lower river. But these merchants refused the privilege. There
was nothing for it but to put the Niger Coast protectorate squarely
under the rule of London. Throughout the British attitude to the Niger
had been negative: ‘so long as we keep other European nations out, we
need not be in a hurry to go in.’ Whatever this dictum rings of, it does not
sound like imperialism.
The politicians of Paris were equally averse to colonising their new
spheres. True, Ferry was saying by 1885 that France must have colonies
for all the usual reasons — investment, markets, prestige, the civilising
mission — but he had been swept out of office in March by the critics of his
colonial adventures: the Freycinet who had followed him in office did not
wish to follow him out again. Plainly, the French Congo was a new white
elephant. The Gabon was an old one. The French government treated
both of them with scorn. In 1887 it stopped its annual subsidy to the Gabon 1
and loftily warned Brazza, the administrator of the Congo, that ‘ we cannot
stay indefinitely in a period of costly exploration’. 8 Until the 1890’s there
1 Head of West African Mission to Dfcazes, 19 October 1885, 25 March 1886, Archives
du Gouvemement-G<5n6ral, Afrique fiquatoriale Frangaise (henceforth A.E.F.), 2 B, 28.
* Freycinet to Brazza, 12 April 1886, A.E.M.D., Afrique, 94.
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were only fifteen French officials in the region. Its annual export was
only worth fisoo. 1 Paris was no less sceptical about its possessions in
the Gulf of Benin. All the Quai d’Orsay could find to say in their favour
was that ‘even if we admit that they are of small value. . .[they] are
bargaining counters which . . . may be useful for our interests elsewhere \
The heads of the Ministry of Marine ‘ show[ed] themselves very lukewarm,
not merely to the development, but to the maintenance pure and simple
of the French holdings in West Africa’. 2 On the Upper Niger too, they
felt no enthusiasm for turning their sphere into a full-blown colony. At
the Berlin Conference, neutralisation of the river and free trade along its
entire course had been the most they had wanted. 8 But when the British
made the Niger Company the monopolists of free trade on the lower river,
they may have fooled themselves, but they did not fool the French. The
glaring paradox behind this goaded Freycinet into declaring a protectorate
over the Upper Niger in 1 887 to forestall an extension of so bizarre a theory
of free trade. 4 Politically, he meant to go no farther than a vague network
of alliances with the Muslim rulers of the area, and early in 1887 Gallieni
signed treaties with Amadu Shehu and Samori, by far the most powerful
of them. His agreements did not commit France, he explained, neither
would they cost her anything. They were simply meant ‘to enlarge the
limits of our future commercial empire and to close these regions to
foreign designs’. Trade was supposed to bind these Muslim states to
France: 5 but there was not enough of it. ‘It is only retail business,’
Gallium’s successor reported, ‘the means of transport are lacking for
anything larger. ’* All that Paris had envisaged on the Upper Niger was
a small, cheap and conditional option on the region.
If the diplomats and commercial travellers after the Ber l i n Conference
had been deciding these West African affairs on their merits, things would
have gone no farther than that. But as usual they had reckoned with an
Africa without the Africans. So their intentions were one thing; the
outcome on the spot was another. Driven on by the Egyptian crisis,
the West African ‘scramble’ could no longer be halted at will. The old
stand-still arrangements could no longer stand. In the end, even paper
protectorates were to perform that special alchemy which makes one
people regard the remote lands of others as ‘possessions’ and itself as
responsible for their well-being. But it was not working strongly yet;
imperial sentiment in Europe was the least of the reasons for the
1 Memo. no. 70, 24 January 1890, A.E.F., Rapports sur la Situation Intdrieure, October
1886-Februaiy 1890.
* Foreign Ministry memo., 15 April 1887, A.E.M.D., Afrique, 83.
3 Memo. by Services des Colonies, 17 July 1885, Archives of Ministerede laFrance d’Outre
Mer (henceforth M.F.O.M.), Afrique, rv, 12 B.
4 Under-Secretary of Colonies to Freycinet, 1 March 1886, M.F.O.M., Senegal, iv, 84.
6 Memo, by Gallieni, 24 September 1887, M.F.O.M., Senegal, iv, 90; Gallitoi to Under-
secretary for Colonies, 30 July 1887, ibid.
• Memo, by Archinard, 19 August 1889, M.F.O.M., Senegal, iv, 93 a.
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scramble. They are rather to be found in West Africa itself. The diplomatic
flurry had compelled governments to back their traders’ efforts to break
through the middlemen chiefs and trade up-country. So a rivalry for
commercial options was spreading as a result from the coast to the interior,
with every port competing against its neighbours for a hinterland and its
officials plunging deeper into the politics of the African bush. Even so,
most of the powers held these local tendencies in check. Germany
ceased to extend her claims once the diplomatic manoeuvres of 1884 and
1885 had been completed, content to take diplomatic advantage of the
Anglo-French dissension to improve her position in Europe. No more
ambitious were the British, on the west coast at least. Not only were they
wary of going too far in their dealings with powerful Muslims in the back-
lands, they parsimoniously reined back all advances until local trade and
colonial revenue had developed sufficiently to pay for them. What they had
on the Niger, they held ; but elsewhere the English usually let West Africa go.
It was to the French that it went. For the next fifteen years they made
all the running in the western parts of the continent; but not altogether
by choice. It would be puerile to argue that they were driven on by a search
for glory — most Frenchmen had no idea of the whereabouts of Bafoulabe.
Admittedly, the established influence of the military in their colonial
affairs made the politicians prone to give their army in Africa its head. But
what necessitated their headlong conquest of the middle Niger, the
northern Ivory Coast and the western Sudan after 1887 was a series of
involuntary imbroglios with the fighting Muslim theocracies of these
regions. The hapless policy-makers of Paris had designed no more than
a vague paramountcy over them. It was bad luck that, like the Egyptians,
the Mahdists and southern Tunisians, the theocrats preferred the jihad
to working with the French and so dragged them into vast imperial
conquests instead. The paper partition had set the French army to grips
with a reviving and recalcitrant Islam. In subjugating it, the paper empire
had to be occupied.
In the history of Africa, the long expansion of Islam since the eighth
century dwarfs the brief influence of Europe. From this western Sudan
between the Senegal and Lake Tchad, between the coastal forests and the
Sahara, the puritanic Almoravides had set forth to rule over Spain and
the Maghreb. Here the golden empires of Mali and Ghana had risen and
fallen; here Muslims and animists had struggled for centuries. Yet the
difficulty of assimilating tribes into nations had foiled the making of
enduring states. By the seventeenth century, Islam here was at best the
cult of aristocracies lording it over a mass of pagan subjects. But from
the later eighteenth century, the creed was on the march once more.
United by the spread of Muslim brotherhoods with their calls for religious
reform, the Tokolor and Fulani peoples rose in holy war upon their
decadent Muslim rulers, riveting new empires upon the animists. At the
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end of the nineteenth century, when the British bumped into them in
what is now northern Nigeria, their force was spent, and the Fulani emirs
who had inherited the disunited provinces of the Sokoto empire were
unable to resist British suzerainty. But the French had no such luck with
the Tokolor and Manding empires to the west. By 1864 El Hadj Omar at
the head of the Tijani order had brought the western Sudan from Futa to
Timbuktu under his sway. When the French confronted this empire,
Amadu Shehu, his successor, was imposing conformity to his version of
Islam, and so overcoming the cleavage between rulers and ruled to forge a
unified power. It was in the nature of such empires, founded in holy war,
bound together by theocracy and the brotherhood of all believers, that
their commanders could no longer command if they co-operated with a
Christian power. Amadu and Samori were the prisoners of their own
systems of leadership, unable to work their treaties with France without
destroying their own authority. Both chose to fight rather than to abdicate.
By 1889 Paris found out that Gallidni’s loose protectorate meant a far-
reaching military conquest.
All the traditions of the Ministry of Marine were against it. ‘It is the
negation of all our policy’, the governor protested, ‘ . . .it means starting
a holy war... poor Senegal.’ 1 But covered by Etienne, the Algerian
Under-Secretary for Colonies, the local army commanders seized their
chance. 2 In 1890 Colonel Archinard broke the power of Amadu. Thence-
forward protests from Paris could not stop the sand-table thinkers of the
Upper Senegal Command from encompassing and crushing the embattled
Muslim aristocracies one by one. In ‘absolute violation of orders’, 3
Archinard next invaded Samori’s empire. For the next eight years that
potentate and his mobile. Sofa hordes kept the French army in hot pursuit
from the Upper Niger to the Ivory Coast. Grappling with him and other
disaffected Muslim leaders, the French were to end by occupying the
entire western Sudan. Having gone so far against their will in the 1880’s,
logic brought them to rationalise these haphazard conquests in the 1890’s.
French Africa was to be all of a piece ; Senegal and Algeria to be joined with
the hinterlands of the Guinea, Ivory and Dahoman coasts; these in their
turn to be linked with the French Congo at the shores of Lake Tchad.
For the most part, the British looked on and acquiesced. As Salisbury
put it ironically, ‘Great Britain has adopted the policy of advance by
commercial enterprise. She has not attempted to compete with the military
operations of her neighbour.’ Her priority in Africa lay in protecting the
position in Egypt and, from 1889, in closing off the Nile valley for this
purpose. In hope of damping down the Egyptian quarrel, Salisbury saw
no harm in offering another round of West African compensations to France
1 Vallon to Under-Secretary for Colonies, 22 March 1890, M.F.O.M., S£n6gal, iv, 95 c.
* Memo, by Archinard, 19 August, 1889, M.F.O.M., Senegal, rv, 93 a.
* Etienne to Governor of Senegal, 14 April 1891, M.F.O.M., Stodgal, 91 b.
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between 1889 and 1891. This vicarious generosity cost nothing either to give
or to take, so Paris accepted it. The Gambian hinterland was signed away
to French Senegal ; that of Sierra Leone to French Guinea. But it was the
Convention of August 1890 that gave the French their largest windfall;
and once again the Egyptian priorities of the British shook the tree. To
compensate Paris for the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, in which
the Germans gave him a free hand at Zanzibar and over the Nile, Salisbury
cheerfully consigned to France the ‘light soils’ of the Sahara and the
western Sudan between Algeria, Senegal and the Say-Barruwa line
resting on Lake Tchad. This enormous paper concession of other people’s
countries the Quai d’Orsay accepted with the same irony with which
it was given: ‘Without any appreciable effort, without any large sacrifice,
without the expense of exploration..., without having made a single
treaty ... we have induced Britain to recognise . . . that Algeria and Senegal
shall form a continuous belt of territory Political access to Lake Tchad
seems important It may become the nodal point for trade routes
But in striving to extend our activity towards central Africa, there is a
more important consideration, bound up with more pressing and con-
crete interests. We want to get it recognised once and for all that no
European nation can ever resist our influence in the Sahara and that we
shall never be taken in the rear in Algeria.’ 1 For the colonial zealots,
there may have been enchantment in such a view. But for the technicians
of national security these large but unconsidered trifles were worth
picking up only so far as they improved French security in North Africa,
and so in the Mediterranean. Like their counterparts in London, it was
not so much a new empire as the future of their old interests in Europe
and the East that they were seeking in Africa. For the French this meant
security in Algeria’s hinterland. But it also meant security in Egypt. So
Salisbury’s bargains could not end the scramble for Africa. France would
take all she could get in the west. But she could not afford thereby to be
appeased along the Nile.
On the east coast, the Egyptian occupation had also shattered the old
modus vivendi. Up to 1884 naval power had given Britain the leading
influence from Port Natal to Cape Guardafui — an influence exerted through
the puppet sultan of Zanzibar, partly to keep other powers off the flank
of the route to India, chiefly to put down the Arab slave trade. Unlike
West Africa, the east coast had no large states on the mainland. Neither was
there any large trade. Ivory was hauled by slaves, cloves were grown by
slaves, caravans were stocked with slaves; commerce of this sort had
fallen foul of European prejudices and it was being snuffed out. In doing
this the powers kept on good terms with each other. In 1862 the British
1 Foreign Ministry memo., ‘ Considerations sur le projet d’arrangement franco-anglais’,
13 August 1890, A.E.M.D., Afrique, 129.
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and French had made one of their gentlemen’s agreements to respect the
sultan’s independence. True, his regime was failing. Europe had used
him to impose the anti-slavery ethics of Christendom upon his Muslim
subjects, and this was over-stretching his authority as their religious head.
Yet no government wanted a colony where there was so little to colonise.
In 1878 the Foreign Office had refused to back the shipowner William
Mackinnon in developing a concession of Zanzibar’s mainland possessions.
Four years later it turned a deaf ear to the sultan’s pleas for what amounted
to a British protectorate. London and Bombay considered that this would
call for expenditure ‘ out of all proportion to the advantages to be gained ’.
Towards the end of 1884 Karl Peters could tout his blank treaty forms
around Tanganyika acting as commercial traveller for the struggling
Kolonialverein ; yet Gladstone’s ministry would not hear of a Kilimanjaro
protectorate.
But in February 1885 a new factor upset this equilibrium. Bismarck
recognised the agreements of Peters — the man he had previously called
a mountebank. As the Berlin West African Conference was disbanding,
the Chancellor rigged up a paper protectorate for the German East
Africa Company. Britain and France were reaching agreement on
Egypt’s finances. The time had come to pick another small African quarrel
with Granville and to give another boost to the entente with France.
Once again the Egyptian baton did its work. London accepted Bismarck’s
claims and bade the sultan of Zanzibar do the same. As Gladstone
put it: ‘it is really impossible to exaggerate the importance of getting out
of the way the bar to the Egyptian settlement . . . [and] winding] up at
once these small colonial controversies.’ Just the same, the Indian and
Foreign Offices did not wish to be ousted from the entire coast, for the
harbours at Mombasa and Zanzibar had some bearing on the security of
India. The upshot was another paper partition. In their East African
agreement of October 1886, Salisbury and Bismarck divided the mainland,
giving the northern sphere to Britain, the southern to Germany. But the
governments meant to keep out of the lands they had earmarked. Here
at last was Mackinnon’s chance. London chartered his British East Africa
Company, so as to put a sentry on its claim; to the south Berlin placed
the German company in possession.
These paper insurances, casually fobbed off on traders, left the old
political hands elegantly bored. Granville and Derby agreed that ‘there
[was] something absurd in the scramble for colonies’. They were ‘little
disposed to join in it’. Gladstone welcomed Germany’s protectorates.
Salisbury did not mind either, so long as they guaranteed free trade.
German support in Cairo and Constantinople was cheap at the price.
In Berlin and Paris the statesmen were taking their new possessions just
as lightly. But here, as in West Africa, they were committing themselves
to more than they bargained for. By 1889 the German company was at
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war with Bushiri and the Swahili slaving chiefs ; and the Berlin governm ent
had to rescue and replace its penniless caretaker so as to save face.
Mackinnon’s company was heading for ruin as well, so little did British
investors value the attractions of East Africa. This was far more serious.
By this time, the hinterland of the British sphere had become entangled
with the security of the Nile valley and Salisbury’s plans for the safety of
India in Egypt.
Baring’s failure to come to terms with Egyptian nationalists was partly
responsible for this far-fetched design. The continuing occupation had
directly shifted the Mediterranean balance. In 1887 Salisbury had sent
Drummond Wolff to Constantinople to make what was probably his last
serious offer to evacuate the Nile Delta. The troops would sail away
within three years if the powers would agree that they could sail back again
in case of need. The Porte accepted. But French and Russian diplomacy
combined to wreck the agreement. Salisbury pondered the meaning of
this debacle. British influence at Constantinople was not what it had been.
Plainly the chances of patching up and packing up in Egypt had dwindled
since 1885. Despite Bismarck’s manoeuvres, France was now moving out
of isolation and into the Franco-Russe toward the end of the 1880’s.
Worse still, Salisbury found that there were not enough ironclads to
fight their way through the Mediterranean against such a combination.
How then could the Turk be propped up against Russia? As the margin of
security shrank at Constantinople, Salisbury saw the need of broadening
it at Cairo. To be safe in Egypt he adopted the policy of keeping other
powers out of the Nile basin. Fear lay behind this policy, the alarmist
calculation that ‘ a civilised, European power ... in the Nile valley . . . could
so reduce the water supply as to ruin [Egypt]’. So from 1890 the British
ran up their bids, claiming a sphere along the whole river and its approaches,
from Mombasa and Wadi Haifa to Lake Victoria Nyanza. To gain as
much as this, they were ready to tout compensations over most of the
continent. As the British pivot began to swing from the Asiatic to the
African shores of the eastern Mediterranean, the second phase of partition
spread from Uganda and Ethiopia to the Zambezi river, from the Red Sea
to the Upper Niger. By 1891 there was little more of Africa left to divide.
The partition was all over, bar the ultimatums.
Without much cavil, Berlin agreed to stay out of the Nile basin. Haunted
by her nightmare of coalitions, Germany was more trapped by European
circumstances than any other of the partitioners. In March 1 890 William II
and Caprivi had decided to abandon the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia.
They made no difficulty about scrapping many of their options in East
Africa in return for a visible rapprochement with Britain in Europe.
Gaining Heligoland and the extension of their sphere from Dar-es-Salaam
westward to Lake Tanganyika and the northern end of Lake Nyasa, they
agreed to a formal British protectorate over Zanzibar; they gave up their
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claims to Witu, which would otherwise have blocked British access to
Lake Victoria from Mombasa; and they cut back their claims in the
north, so conceding Uganda to the British and shutting themselves out of
the Upper Nile valley. For Salisbury, things could not have been better.
‘The effect of this [Heligoland-Zanzibar] arrangement’, he congratulated
himself, ‘will be that. . .there will be no European competitor to British
influence between the ist degree of S[outh] latitude [running through the
middle of Lake Victoria] and the borders of Egypt.’ On paper, at least,
his chief purpose had been achieved. This entailed scrapping Rhodes’s
romantic idea of a Cape-to-Cairo corridor between the Congo Free State
and German East Africa. But Salisbury was no romantic. And in any
case he had also cleared all German obstacles out of the way of the British
South Africa Company’s advance into what is now Rhodesia. After
Berlin, he dealt with Lisbon. By the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1891,
Salisbury threw back the musty claims of Mozambique in Matabeleland
to secure the company’s claim there. This was partition with a vengeance.
But Salisbury had not finished yet. Next it was the turn of the Italians.
No European nation had moved into Africa with less authority or less
enthusiasm than they. In 1882 their government had bought the Bay of
Assab from an Italian firm; three years later it had occupied the Red Sea
port of Massawa with British encouragement. Better the Italians than the
French or the Mahdists. This brought the new Romans into contact with
the Ethiopians. Questioned about the possibilities of the new sphere two
years later, di Robilant, the Foreign Minister, refused ‘to attach much
importance to a few robbers who happen to be raising dust around our
feet in Africa’. But things were to be different. The old system of ministries
living on the freedom-fighting of the Risorgimento gave way to a confusion
that Francesco Crispi contrived to dominate from 1887 to 1896. Before
he came to office he had opposed imperialism. After the old Redshirt had
reached the head of the regime of which he had once been the critic, he had
to find a new field for his extremism. He found it in African expansion.
For successful radicals this was not unusual at the end of the century.
The new brand of full-blooded imperialism was occasionally the resort of
arrivistes moving from left to right ; for in joining the old oligarchs, they
gave up much of their former domestic stock-in-trade. Chamberlain
forgot about his unauthorised programme; Gambetta’s heirs turned their
backs on the nouvelles couches : Crispi passed laws against the socialists.
As the least disturbing issue for the transitional ministries to which they
belonged, they were all permitted to express overseas the nonconformism
they had to muffle at home.
The empty wharves of Massawa gave Crispi his chance for originality.
Without a hinterland they would continue to crumble. To avenge the
Italian defeat at Dogali at the hands of the Ethiopian Ras Alula, Crispi
launched a punitive expedition whose gains were organised into the colony
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of Eritrea in 1 890. More than that, he embarked upon a design for informal
paramountcy over Ethiopia. It was full of conundrums, but when the negus
Yohannes was killed in battle with the Mahdists in 1889, the Italians
imagined that their erstwhile protege, Menilek, Ras of Shoa, would
continue to be their man as negus. He seemed to be a westemiser. He
looked like a client. By the treaty of Ucciali, signed on 2 May, Rome
claimed that he had accepted its protection; Menilek denied it — after
taking delivery of the four million lire and thousands of rifles with which
the Italians had endowed him. For the moment, Eritrea seemed to have
a bright future of trade with Ethiopia. A year later the di Rudini ministry
in pursuit of more trade pushed their colony’s frontier westwards to
Kassala, which lies on a tributary of the Nile, flush inside the Dervish
country.
Fecklessly, the Italians were being drawn into the dangerous vortices
of Dervish and Ethiopian politics, as the British had been drawn into those
of Egypt, and the French into those of Tunis and the western Sudan.
They were rushing in to meddle with two African societies ferociously
united through a species of proto-nationalism against the unbelievers; but
their catastrophe was yet to come. What concerned Salisbury and Baring
in 1890 was that these Roman inroads into Ethiopia and the eastern Sudan
had brought them closest to the sacred serpent of the Nile. Italian ex-
pansion into the realms of the King of Kings was not unwelcome in
London. It had the merit of blocking any French advance on the Nile
valley from the Red Sea ports of Djibouti and Obok. But the thrust on
Kassala was a different story. Salisbury was not shutting the French and
Germans out of the valley to let the Italians in. Early in 1891 therefore,
he brought them to sign a treaty in which they agreed ‘to keep their hands
off the affluents of the Nile’; and rewarded them by recognising then-
claim to preponderance over much of the Horn of Africa.
By edging towards the Triple Alliance and signing away huge stretches
of unoccupied Africa, Salisbury had bought safety in Egypt from the
Germans and Italians. But it was not to be bought from the French. All
the donations of Tight soils’ in West Africa would not soothe them into
letting bygones be bygones in Egypt. Instead of consenting to leave the
Nile alone, Paris, with increasing support from St Petersburg, demanded
evacuation. More and more firmly, London refused. Egypt was still the
deep rift between France and Britain. The way to the Nile still lay open
from the west. Hence the partition of Africa went furiously on into the
1890’s.
It is familiar enough, the diplomacy which contrived the astonishing
partitions of the 1880’s; but the motives behind them are stranger than
fiction. As they drew their new map of Africa by treaty, the statesmen of
the great powers intended nothing so simple or so serious as the making
of colonies there. There were traders and missionaries who clamoured for
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imperial aid for their enterprises ; but it was not they, it was the politicians
who decided: and the politicians had no time for the notion that state
action should develop the tropics in the interest of national prosperity.
Trade, and the political influence that went with it, might expand in
Africa; or again it might not. In either case the statesmen were happy to
leave the matter to private energies. For tropical Africa at the end of the
nineteenth century this meant that next to nothing would be done, for
private business was as yet utterly unready to do it. Then were ‘claims for
posterity’ the objects? There is a grain of truth in this old view, but it was
more a rationalisation after the event. As they sliced up more and more
of the continent, the politicians found it easier to explain their actions in
terms of new markets and civilising missions than in terms of the more
sophisticated and less high-minded concepts on which their minds were
privately running.
Those who presided over the partition saw it with a cold and detached
view. It was not Africa itself which they saw; it was its bearing on their
great concerns in Europe, the Mediterranean and the East. Their pre-
occupations were tangential to the continent to a degree possible only in
the official mind. They acted upon their traditional concepts of national
interests and dangers. They advanced, not the frontiers of trade or empire,
but the frontiers of fear.
From a European point of view, the partition treaties are monuments
to the flights of imagination of which official minds are capable, when
dealing with a blank map of two-thirds of a continent. The strategists
anticipated every contingency: the diplomats bargained for every farthing
of advantage; while the geographers showed them the whereabouts of the
places they were haggling over. From an African standpoint, the main
result of their efforts was to change the international status of territory
on paper. Turning res nullius into res publica made work for lawyers.
It was to be a long time before it made work for Africans.
This perpetual fumbling for safety in the world at large drove the powers
to claim spheres, to proclaim protectorates, to charter companies; but in
almost all cases this was done with no purpose more positive than to keep
out others whose presence could conceivably inconvenience a national
interest, no matter how speculative or unlikely. So Bismarck had laid
out a paper empire in 1884-5 mainly to make a Franco-German entente
look plausible. Caprivi had added to it in 1890 to make an Anglo-
German rapprochement feasible. So Gladstone had moved into Egypt to
protect Suez ; Salisbury had laid out the ground-plan of British East Africa
to be safe in Egypt and Asia. In the main, British Africa was a gigantic
footnote to the Indian empire; and much of the long struggle between
France and the Muslims was an expensive pendant to her search for
security in the Mediterranean. Perhaps the only serious empire-builders
of the 1880’s were Crispi and Leopold, and they merely snatched at the
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crumbs from the rich men’s tables. For the rest, there was indeed a
‘scramble in Africa’. But it was anything but a ‘scramble for Africa’.
Yet if the procedures of the partition were diplomatic and European
rivalries affected it, this is far from saying that it was caused chiefly by
the workings of the European power balance. Had this been so, these
new empires would have ended as they began — on paper. Anglo-
French competition, which had given the Germans their chance in Africa,
had sprung from the English fiascos with Egyptian revolutionaries
and Mahdists; it was to quicken as these imbroglios merged into those
of the French with the Muslims of the western Sudan and into those of the
Italians with the Christian nationalists of Ethiopia. The European preten-
sions provoked new African resistances, and these compelled further
European exertions. So the partition gained a new momentum. The
quickening occupation of tropical Africa in the 1890’s, as distinct from the
paper partitions of the 1880’s, was the double climax of two closely
connected conflicts: on the one hand, the struggle between France and
Britain for control of the Nile ; on the other, the struggle between European,
African, Christian and Muslim expansions for control of North and Central
Africa. Having embarked so lightly on the African game, the rulers of
Europe had now to take it seriously.
What was the nature of this continent into which Europe was spreading?
If ‘Africa’ is merely a geographical expression, it is also a sociological
shorthand for the bewildering variety of languages, religions and societies
that occupy it. At one end of the scale in aptitude and achievement, the
white men found peoples organised in minute segmentary groups, lacking
any political authority at the centre, and finding their social cohesion in
the unity of equals, not in the unity imposed by a hierarchy. These merged
into a second type, the segmentary states where kingship had made little
lasting impression upon the particularism of tribal kinships, where the
forces of assimilation had been baffled. At the other end of this range
came the sophisticated Muslim states and the military confederacies of
the most dynamic Negro and Bantu nations. As the Europeans began to
deal with Africa, they met trouble from societies of all these types. But
their scuffles with the warriors of the segmentary systems have no great
significance from the standpoint of the partition: for the rivalries of the
kinships and tribes within them almost always provided collaborators,
as well as rebels against alien control. But in the case of the organised
African states things were very different. Their reception of the white
man had a profound effect on the partition of the nineteenth century, just
as it left a fiery legacy for the African nationalism of the twentieth.
They reacted in different ways. Some began by resisting, but went down
before the first whiff of grape-shot, and have remained passive until only
yesterday. Others accepted their new overlords only to rebel within a
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decade. Others again were flatly opposed to white influence in any shape
or form, and were beaten down only after years of savage guerrillas. Yet
there were other peoples who came easily to terms with the European,
signing his treaty forms, reading his Bibles, trading with his storekeepers.
How are these differences to be explained? What led Africans to bare the
teeth or to smile a welcome, to come to school or to fight a war to the
death? It depended perhaps upon the kind of unity they possessed and
on the state of its repair.
From what little is known about it, African political history has shown
an extremely high turn-over of regimes. Like the kingdoms of Europe
in the Middle Ages, they were chronically short of reserve power at the
centre against the overmighty subject and the turbulent priest. Much
more than the medieval governments of Europe, they lacked the binding
principles of political association which could assimilate conquered
neighbours into loyal subjects. This seems to have been particularly true
of animist Africa. An animist people, bound together by the web of
kinship and by an ancestral religion, could hardly extrapolate these
points of union to those it had conquered. In the states which they created,
rulers and ruled tended to remain divided. In organisation, the empires
which they founded were but tribes writ large; and as kinship loyalties
loosened down the generations, their provinces split off and their centres
fell into disorders. So much of the history of African policies runs through
very-short-term cycles of expansion and contraction, like the heavings of
a diaphragm. Hunting for gold or salt or slaves, they might enlarge their
territories, but this geographical expansion usually led in the end to
political crack-up. How they reacted to the inroads of Europe, therefore,
was partly determined by the point they had reached in their cycle of
growth and decay. At a time of down-turn, their rulers would have strong
reasons for striking a bargain with the new invaders. But challenged
during a period of upswing, they might choose to fight it out to the end.
Yet again, the more urbanised, commercial and bureaucratic the polity,
the more its rulers would be tempted to come to terms before their towns
were destroyed. On the other hand, the more its unity hung together on
the luxuries of slave-raiding, plunder and migration, the less its aristocracy
had to lose by struggling against the Europeans.
Here then were two of the many variables in settling the issue of co-
operation or resistance. Not a few animist states whose economy was
predatory and whose expansion was in progress fought for their indepen-
dence. Both the Matabele and the Dahomians did so ; but once they were
beaten they stayed beaten. Perhaps the low generality of their creeds
made them highly vulnerable to the culture of their conquerors. The work
started with powder and shot could be completed with the New Testament,
and many who came to fight remained to pray. Within a decade of the
running up of the Union Jack, the Baganda and Nyasa had taken avidly
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to the new learning and were staffing the government offices of East and
Central Africa. In French Equatorial Africa the Bacongo became the
agents of white administration, justastheBaluba were to do in the Katanga.
Such docility was possible among the Muslims, too, when it was a
question of dealing with settled Islamic states which had flowered into
bureaucracies and passed their peak. For their staid and venerable sultans
and almamys there was as small an attraction in calling a jihad as there
was for the Bey of Tunis. Yet apparently religion had much to do with
the issue. In many other Muslim polities the harsh imperatives of the
Koran were readily obeyed. The plain fact is that the longest and bloodiest
fighting against the forces of Europe was carried out by Muslims. No
European blandishments could charm them into becoming good neigh-
bours. The task was one for fire-power, not philanthropy.
Robber empires, still expanding into black Africa, still mobile, still
led by prophets of the faith — there were good reasons why they could
not yield. They were incomparably better fitted to defy and resist than
the animists. Islam’s insistence on the equality of all believers under one
law, together with its extensive brotherhoods and orders, provided firmer
strands of unity which transcended the bonds of mere kinship and ancestral
religions. Moreover, it postulated a principle of universal Godhead above
any of the local deities and fetishes which divided black Africa. Supra-
tribal Muslim institutions and discipline sometimes presented a coherent
and continuous resistance. They also made surrender to Christian powers
impossible without dissolving the forces of Muslim authority and empire.
For many of these fierce foes had fashioned their power out of a sort of
Muslim protestantism — attempts to purge Islam of scholiast accretions
by moving back to the pristine purity of the Koran of the desert and
rejecting the authority of the corrupted Caliphate at Constantinople. On
the frontiers of the faith, it was new prophets who combined this stem,
unbending fundamentalism with the thirst of tribes for independence and
conquest. Muhammad al-Mahdi in the Sudan, Sayyid al-Mahdi among
his Sanusi, Amadu Shehu and Samori of the Sofas, Rabih — all of these
were prophets or caliphs of prophets and local theocrats. They were no
less leaders of independence movements. Independence in African terms
meant expansion and the dependence of others upon them, so they became
conquerors of infidels for the true faith. After all, it is only armed prophets
who have not been destroyed.
To survive, embattled theocrats of this sort had to be proof against the
politics of influence practised by invading Christendom. The new dispensa-
tions which they preached had made obsolete all the cities and kingdoms
of this world. They called upon all to return to God according to their
revelation or be destroyed by him. If they compromised with the enemy
after such preachings, they would be digging their own graves. Something
of this adamantine attitude to unbelievers still rings in the Mahdi’s message
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to the Christian emperor, Yohannes of Ethiopia: ‘Become a Musli m and
peace will be unto you If on the other hand you choose disobedience
and prefer blindness . . . [have] no doubt about your falling into our hands
as we are promised the possession of all the earth. God fulfils His promises.
. . .Let not the Devil hinder you.’ 1 African Christianity, at least in Ethiopia,
produced the same unyielding toughness. Shadowy and bizarre though
the monophysite creeds of the Coptic church might be, they helped to rally
national solidarity behind the emperor when the Italians brought the time
of troubles.
The deadliest enemies of European expansion into Africa were those
states suffused by Islam or Christianity, both of them supra-tribal religious
organisations capable of forging tribes into national unities. Believing
that the white man was an infidel as well as an invader, these Copts and
Muslims faced him, strong in the knowledge of a righteous cause.
Meeting with so complete a self-confidence, the white men were pushed
into choices they would have preferred — indeed, that they expected — to
burke. There was no sensible negotiating to be done with theocrats, still
less any converting. Their opposition raised local crises which could
not be glossed over. Once the theocracies had been aroused by the
challenge of Europe, it became a matter of everything or nothing.
Dragged ever deeper into reactions which their own coming had provoked,
the powers were forced in the 1890’s to occupy the claims which they
had papered on to the African map in the 1880’s. The spectacular ex-
pansion that resulted has often been called imperialism. But at a deeper
level it was a reflex to the stirrings of African proto-nationalism.
Whether they liked it or not, the white men were now committed to
making sense out of the abstract dispositions of the 1880’s. The harsh
facts of Africa compelled it. For the French, lured on by British acqui-
escence and the dashing strategies of their colonial soldiers, there was no
escape. In pursuit of Amadu the army had been drawn westward to
Timbuktu. It was soon to go on to Gao, and the Upper Niger Command
modulated into Soudan Francois. In Paris the politicians had had enough.
In 1891 and 1893 they called a halt to the soldiers, announcing that ‘the
period of conquest and territorial expansion must be considered as
definitely over’. 3 Already the problem was how to make their new acqui-
sitions pay; but the colonels, with one hand on their Maxims and the other
on their next set of proofs, were bent on routing out Muslim resistance
yet farther afield, in Futa Jalon and the Upper Volta. Paris turned up its
nose at the new provinces. But the very fact of pacification gave them
1 Mahdi to Negus Yohannes, 1884-5, quoted in Sanderson, G.N.: ‘Contributions from
African Sources to the. . .History of European Competition in the Upper Valley of the
Nile’ : Leverhulme Conference Paper, University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, i960.
8 Deicasse to Grodet, 4 December 1893, M.F.O.M., Soudan, 1, 6 a.
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a fictitious value — since hard-won territory could hardly be given up. So
step by step the army eventually involved Paris in the economics of develop-
ment. When Trentinian took over the Sudan in 1895 the era of the sabre
had ended. With the coming of government investment to push the railway
up to the Niger, closer administration became possible and the battlefield
was turned into a colony.
Gradually, the French grew more entangled in Dahomey and the Congo.
In 1890 General Dodds, covered by fitienne in Paris, 1 slipped the leash
and crushed the pagan slave-raiding confederacy of Dahomey, which had
proved an impossible neighbour to the French on the coast. The way
was open for a thrust inland. By 1894 French agents were reconnoitring
Nikki; they were poised to invade the undefined western flanks of Goldie’s
monopoly on the lower Niger; what was more, they had seen a chance of
uniting Dahomey with their fields of influence on the Senegal, Ivory Coast,
Upper Volta and Upper Niger. Since 1889 the colonial zealots had been
pressing the government to go one better still. Belatedly they would
rationalise all the incongruous advances of the past decade by joining
these territories to the starveling French Congo. TTie junction and symbol
of this geographical romanticism was to be Lake Tchad.
After ten years in which their diplomats and soldiers had played ducks
and drakes with West Africa, there emerged a group in Paris who demanded
that the French empire should be taken seriously for its own sake. In
1890 their private subscriptions sent Crampel from Brazzaville to establish
French sway in the regions of Lake Tchad and so ensure ‘the continuity
of our possessions between Algeria, Senegal and the Congo *.* So little did
this pipe-dream charm the Quai d’Orsay that in August they signed away
the Tchad corridor to Britain. In protest Crampel’s supporters toward
the end of 1890 organised the Comiti de VAfrique frangaise — the first
serious pressure group in favour of a tropical African empire; but at no
time did it attract any powerful business interests ; and though it had the
blessing of fitienne, its direct political influence was not spectacular.
There was a certain grandiloquent appeal in the Comite’s idea of turning
Tchad into the linch-pin of French Africa, but it was the risks, not the
rhetoric, which moved the politicians. Coming down to the lake from
the north meant striking across the Sahara, but this was clean contrary
to the policy of the Government-General at Algiers. Since the slaughter of
the Flatters expedition by the Touareg in 1880, Algiers had turned down
project after project for Saharan penetration on the ground that it
would be ‘too dangerous’.® There were equally sharp objections against
moving on Tchad from the west. If the thrust went along the Upper Niger,
1 Etienne to Governor of Senegal, 4 December 1891, M.F.O.M., S6n6gal, 1, 91 b.
* Crampel to Under-Secretary for Colonies, 12 March 1890, M.F.O.M., Afrique, 5.
Dossier Crampel, 1890-1.
* Governor-General, Algeria, to Colonies, 19 May 1 896,»M.F.O.M., Afrique, 10. Dossier
Foureau, 1896.
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it would have to fight its way through Muslim opposition, which might have
awkward repercussions in the newly organised French Sudan; as late as
1898 the Government-General in Saint-Louis was against such an advance. 1
The only practicable route seemed to be from the south. In 1891 the Comiti
sent Dybowski, and Brazza sent Foureau, on missions towards the lake
from the Congo. Both were hurled back. Once more, French expansion
had contrived to entangle itself with Muslim resistance. The wreckage of
the Arab slaving state in the Bahr al-Ghazal had driven its survivors into
the Wadai country. Here they were reorganised by Rabih into a strong,
predatory state, which saw the Europeans as dangerous rivals. Another
theocracy was in the making. Rabih ‘found in religion more support
and strength than a mere desire for loot would have given to a band of
adventurers’; 2 and after he had moved on to the Bagirmi country by the
shores of Tchad, the support of the Sanusi, coupled with the military skills
he brought from Egypt, made him a formidable opponent.
For Brazza, the Commissioner-General of the Republic in the Congo,
the Comite's drive on Tchad was doubly welcome. It pushed out his
frontiers, and it attracted the interest of Paris towards his neglected colony ;
it remained for him to associate the minority enthusiasm of the Lake
Tchad school with a serious national interest that would appeal to the
cynics of the Quai d’Orsay. In 1891 he was suggesting to Paris that the
expeditions towards Tchad ‘can. . .produce a situation for us which. . .
will allow us to start negotiations with Britain about reciprocal con-
cessions over the Egyptian question. . . This was the germ of the French
Fashoda strategy. In August 1891 Liotard was sent to the Ubanghi-Shari
country, the western gateway to the Nile valley, with instructions to use
the well-tried Brazza methods of influence on the small sultans there. If
Paris were to take the plunge into reopening the Nile question, here was
a possible method of doing so, and here were the means to hand.
Paris was to take the plunge. Like all the crucial moves in the struggle
for tropical Africa, this was decided by a turn in the chronic Egyptian
crisis. Salisbury had taken some of the heat out of it by simply refusing
to discuss it. The French had hoped for better times when the Liberals
came back in 1892, but Rosebery, the new Foreign Secretary, told Paris
point-blank that the Egyptian issue was closed. In January 1 893 the khedive
timidly tried an anti-British coup. Cromer shouldered him back into
subservience; but the crisis had its bright side for Paris. It showed that
the revolutionary situation in Egypt was far from played out. It suggested
that the nationalists inside the country might be usefully allied with pressure
1 Governor-General, French West Africa, toColonies, 12 July 1898, M.F.O.M.,Afrique,i 1.
Dossier Mission Voulet au Lac Tchad.
* Clozel to Colonies, 26 August 1895, M.F.O.M., Afrique, 9, Dossier Clozel.
* Brazza to Colonies, 18 Ap*l 1891, A.E.F. (unclassified); same to same, 6 June 1891,
A.E.F., 2 b.
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from outside to turn the British out of their citadel. The chances of external
action were brightening as well. By 1893, with the Franco-Russe all but
consummated, the strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean looked
much more secure to the Ministry of Marine, once the tsar’s warships had
visited Toulon. The politics of deference were over.
Paris therefore had good reason to take a higher line in the Egyptian
affair. From the diplomats’ viewpoint, the partition of Africa was a
large-scale example of game-theory. One of the rules of the game was
that control of a river’s course amounted to a forcing bid for territory. So
it had been on the Niger. So it had been on the Congo. Why not install a
French force on the Upper Nile? The Nile was Egypt, as everyone knew.
Once the infanterie de Marine had straddled the river, the famous
Egyptian question could be reopened with a vengeance. In May 1893,
Carnot, President of the Republic, revived the Brazza scheme. A task-
force could follow the old route towards Tchad, filter north-west through
Liotard’s empire of influence in Ubanghi-Shari, and then strike hard for
the Nile. They would have to join it south of the Mahdists’ country, since
the Dervishes did not welcome visitors. But one theocracy was as good
as another. Striking the river south of Khartoum would allow the French
to work with Menilek, who was hunting for European rifles and sympathy.
A handful of Frenchmen on the Nile would be picturesque; but joined by
an Ethiopian army they would be portentous.
The contest for Egypt and the Mediterranean was speeding up again.
As it did so, one remote African polity after another was enmeshed into
its toils : the starveling colony of the Congo, the theocracies around Tchad,
the petty Muslim oligarchies of Ubanghi-Shari, the wanderers in the
marshes of the Bahr al-Ghazal, the Coptic state of Ethiopia, the stone-age
men living around the sand-bank at Fashoda. As for the two European
powers whose rivalry had provoked this uproar, they each strained every
nerve to race the other to the dingy charms of the Upper Nile. There had
been a time when light soils were booby prizes. Only the remarkable
insights of late nineteenth-century imperialism could have seen them as
pearls beyond price.
But the Fashoda scheme was risky. The Quai d’Orsay could not assume
that the British would sit smoking their pipes in Cairo while the French
were pitching camp by the banks of the Nile; and so the policy-makers in
Paris held back the colonial enrages. To their minds, the scheme of planting
the tricolour on the Nile was not a colonial scheme but a diplomatic
weapon; they hoped to use it as a baton soudanais to thwack the British
into an Egyptian negotiation. Hence the Fashoda plan went in stops and
starts, to be dragged out of the pigeon-holes whenever London grew
refractory. Before Paris had summoned up the nerve to carry it out,
London was taking precautions against it. On their side, the British were
hard at work building up positions of strength in the valley of the Nile.
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It was in Uganda that they were building. Goaded by the Foreign Office,
Mackinnon’s company had sent Lugard inland to Buganda, to tighten
Britain’s hold on the headwaters of the river. The country was in uproar,
through the struggles of rival factions, goaded on by British Protestant,
French Catholic and African Muslim missionaries. Early in 1892 Lugard
managed to set the Protestants into precarious authority: but vindicating
the principles of the Reformation had exhausted Mackinnon’s finances,
and he ordered Lugard to withdraw from Uganda. This alarmed the
government. Already, military intelligence in Egypt was predicting that
once the company moved out of Uganda, the French forces in Ubanghi
would move in; and the Africanists in the Foreign Office conjured up
French threats on all sides. To them, and to Lord Rosebery, the best
defence lay in going forward. Formally occupying the country would
shut out the French from the sources of the Nile; linking it by rail with
Mombasa would make it a base for shutting them out of the upper
valley as well. But the Gladstonians in the Cabinet would not go so far
as Rosebery. The best he could do was to send Portal to Uganda to report
on the pros and cons of holding it.
Both London and Paris were to find that their insurance premiums were
too low, for now another partitioner, and one much suppler and subtler
than Carnot or Rosebery, declared an interest in the Nile. To a remarkable
extent, Leopold II of the Belgians combined the unction of a monarch
with the energy of a businessman. For all their modest beginnings, it is
Rockefeller, Carnegie and Sanford who offer the closest parallels with this
royal entrepreneur. Like them, he gambled on futures ; like them, he
formed cartels out of chaos; like them again, he was careless of the con-
sequences. Leopold had been given the Congo since his Independent State
was the regime which divided the powers least. It was his own money and
not the taxpayers’ which was used for embellishing the new royal demesne.
But since Leopold’s African flutter was not an act of state but a private
venture, it had to show a cash return — no easy matter this, in the Congo,
where there seemed to be no minerals and where the population showed no
great zest in working for the market. To keep his private empire going,
Leopold badly needed something to export. There was ivory; there was
ebony; but these trades were in the hands of the Arabs, especially those
of the eastern regions of the Congo. Leopold would have come to terms
with them if he could, but his treaties of trade and friendship had no
attraction for these oligarchs and oligopolists lording it over the Negro.
So it came to war, and this drove the Congo Free State deep into the Arab
territories which lay between it and the Nile. In 1891 its missions were
setting up posts in Ubanghi, in 1 893 in the Bahr al-Ghazal, and in the same
year the forces of Van Kerckhoven struck as far as Lado on the Upper
Nile itself.
Such spirited advances were welcome neither in Paris nor in London.
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They were especially awkward for the French. Leopold’s men were
undoubtedly spilling north of the rough frontier proposed in 1887 between
his sphere and theirs on the Congo ; but when they tried to draw the frontier
with some precision in 1892-4 the negotiations showed that none of the
diplomats had the faintest idea of the lie of the land. What was more,
these probings by the Free State showed how weak French authority was
on the ground in the Ubanghi-Shari, scheduled as the launching-site for
a move on Fashoda. Rosebery too had his troubles. He could order
Portal to extend the British sphere from Buganda to the north; after the
Liberals had succeeded at last in dropping their pilot, Gladstone, he
could bring Uganda proper under a formal protectorate. But in the un-
real game the powers were playing for the Upper Nile, the paper bargains
of diplomacy still seemed the best insurances. In May 1894 Rosebery
clinched two agreements. In the first place, the Italians became a holding
company for British interests in Ethiopia. By recognising a Roman
hegemony over Ogaden and Harar, Rosebery could take it for granted
that the negus would not be of much use to French plans, so long as the
Italians were sitting on his border. Secondly, the British tried to neutralise
Leopold. By the Anglo-Congolese agreement he was assigned Equatoria
and much of the Bahr al-Ghazal, so as ‘to prevent the French who are
about to send an expedition to [the Bahr al-Ghazal] from establishing
themselves there, and to settle with the Belgians who are there already
The presence of the French there would be a serious danger to Egypt. ’
Elegant as this paper-work might be, it was all in vain. Rosebery’s
ill-judged attempt to settle the Egyptian issue on the Upper Nile only
provoked the French to greater exertions. In Paris the Colonial Minister
thought that the Anglo-Congolese Treaty ‘seems to call for new measures
on our part’. 1 One of these was to revive, with £70,000 worth of credits,
the scheme of going to Fashoda by way of Ubanghi-Shari. But even now
Hanotaux at the Quai d’Orsay managed to pour water into the Colonial
ministry’s wine. The expedition was to advance along the Ubanghi; but
it was ordered ‘to avoid breaking into the Nile valley’. 2 By August the
second counter-measure was complete. The Anglo-Congolese treaty had
been broken by the classic method of a joint Franco-German denunciation.
Much to Hanotaux’s relief, the Ubanghi striking-force could now be
side-tracked out of harm’s way, to try conclusions with Samori on the
Ivory Coast. 3
Rosebery was forced into direct negotiations with Paris. He was
reported as saying ‘Take all you want in Africa, provided that you keep
off the valley of the Nile’, 4 and like Salisbury before him it was in West
1 Minister of Colonies to Monteil, 13 July 1894, M.F.O.M., Afrique, in, 16-19 (dossier
19 b ).
a Idem; revised draft, with emendations by Hanotaux.
* Minister of Colonies to Monteil, 22 September 1 894, ibid.
4 French charge in London to Hanotaux, 22 September 1894, A.E. Angleterre, 897.
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Africa that he hoped to give his generosity full play. The hinterlands of
the Gold Coast and the borderlands between the French and British spheres
on the Lower Niger might all go in return for safety in Egypt. But since
the French no less than the British thought much more highly of Egypt
than they did of the west coast, there was no basis for a bargain. So the
exchanges over the Nile and the Niger grew angrier, until in March 1895
Grey publicly warned the French that any advance into the Nile valley
would be taken as an ‘unfriendly act’. Sabres were beginning to rattle.
If the contention for Egypt and the Nile had been kept on the diplomatic
level hitherto, it was now to burst into active conquest and occupation.
As it neared its climax, the partition, which had begun almost frivolously,
became hectic. It had been going on for so long that some of the new
generation of politicians — the Delcasses and Chamberlains, had come to
take it seriously, not only as a matter of old-fashioned power-politics
but as a question of African colonies. The partition had brought them to
a kind of geopolitical claustrophobia, a feeling that national expansion
was running out of world space, and that the great powers of the twentieth
century would be those who had filched every nook and cranny of
territory left. Yet it was not ambitions or rivalries of this sort which drove
France and Britain into carrying out their Nile strategies. It was the defeat
of the Italians by the resurgent proto-nationalists of Ethiopia.
How this quasi-feudal, monophysite realm of the Lions of Judah survived
the onslaughts of Islam and the Galla nomads through the centuries is
a question. From the mid-eighteenth century, the emperors had been
shadows, the king-makers all powerful. But after the accession of
Teodros II in 1855 the emperor and his feudatories slowly reunited to
meet the growing menace of foreign invasion. Their disunity had prevented
any effective resistance when Napier’s columns marched to Magdala in
1867 to release the imprisoned British consul. When Crispi, hoping to
buttress his divided ministry with colonial success, occupied Tigr6 and
ordered the Italian army forward into the Ethiopian highlands in 1896,
he relied on the same weakness. His General, Baratieri, knew better.
Italian expansion, he observed, was provoking among the Ethiopians ‘a
kind of negative patriotism’. 1 The negus Menilek was not only equipped
with modem fire-power through the courtesies of white-man’s diplomacy,
he also had the great Rases of Tigre, Gojam, Harar and Wollo behind him.
At Adowa on 1 March 1896 these Ethiopian proto-nationalists crushed the
Italians. It meant the freedom of Ethiopia and the fall of Crispi. It also
meant the first victory of African proto-nationalism. The Mahdists as
well as the Ethiopians were moving against Italian Eritrea. The Italian
outposts of Kassala on the Atbara tributary of the Nile looked like being
cut off altogether.
1 Rubenson, S., ‘Ethiopia in the Scramble’, Leverhulme History Conference Paper,
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1960.
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THE PARTITION OF AFRICA
Adowa so sharply transformed the politics of the Nile basin that
twelve days later Salisbury ordered the Egyptian army under Kitchener
to invade the eastern Sudan. This decision, so he informed Cromer, ‘was
inspired specially by a desire to help the Italians at Kassala; . . .to prevent
the Dervishes from winning a conspicuous success which might have far-
reaching results; and to plant the foot of Egypt rather farther up the Nile’.
It is true that the plight of the Italians seemed fortunate to the British.
The Kaiser urged Salisbury to do something to help his unhappy partner
in the Triple Alliance; and this meant German help in unlocking the
Egyptian treasury to pay for the invasion. But if the Italian defeat gave
the opportunity of attacking the Mahdists, the Ethiopian victory made it
necessary to do so. Hitherto the English had done everything possible to
keep out of the Egyptian Sudan. ‘If the Dervishes have occupied the
valley of the Nile’, Salisbury had told Cromer in.i 890, ‘ they do not pledge
the future in any way . . . they can destroy nothing, for there is nothing to
destroy. ’ Without engineering skills, they could not tamper with the Nile
flow. ‘ Surely . . . this people were [s/c] created for the purpose of keeping
the bed warm for you till you can occupy it.’ Even in 1897 Cromer was
opposing the advance on Khartoum, as it would only lead to the acquisition
of Targe tracts of useless territory which it would be difficult and costly
to administer properly’. Plainly then they were not hastening to conquer
another colony. They cautiously ordered the invasion, to forestall the
French coup on the Upper Nile which Menilek’s victory seemed to have
made practicable.
This calculation was wrong but reasonable. English complacency about
such a coup had rested hitherto on the hope that a French force from the
west would be unable to fight its way through to the Nile; or if it did, that
it would get no help from Menilek under the Italian heel ; or if it did get
such help, that the Egyptian army could conquer the declining Dervish
state before any dangerous Franco-Abyssinian combination could take
place. Adowa transformed Salisbury’s view of these possibilities. Rid
of the Italians, the Ethiopians were much more formidable than had been
supposed ; and if, as Salisbury suspected mistakenly, they were prepared
to act as allies of France, they would be formidable indeed.
The disappearance of the Italians seemed to have put new fife into the
Mahdists as well. It was known that Menilek was angling for an alliance
with them. Not only did this make it less likely that Kitchener would be
able to break through the Mahdists and forestall the French at Fashoda;
it also raised the spectre that the French might launch a Mahdist-Ethiopian
alliance against Egypt itself. Here the British stakes were too great to per-
mit such risks. And Salisbury’s government decided to take precautions
in time. So opened the last great crisis in the partition of tropical Africa.
Like its predecessors, it had been generated by the turn of events in Africa
itself.
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Predictably the invasion of the eastern Sudan provoked Paris to sub-
stantiate Salisbury’s fears by invading it from the west. 1 Three months
after Kitchener started for Dongola, Marchand left for Brazzaville,
en route for Fashoda; and Lagarde went back to Addis Ababa to clinch
the alliance with Menilek and arrange for the rendezvous with Marchand
on the Nile. Whether the Egyptian army, dragging its railway from the
north, could beat down the Khalifa and reach Fashoda ahead of the
French seemed increasingly doubtful. So Salisbury was forced to try
forestalling them from the south. He pressed on the building of the rail-
way from Mombasa to supply the base in Uganda, and in June 1897
Macdonald was ordered to march from there along the Nile to Fashoda
‘ before the French get there from the west ’. So the Anglo-French struggle
for the Nile had set in motion four invasions of the Egyptian Sudan. French
forces were now toiling towards it from east and west, British forces from
north and south.
For long Salisbury was much more worried about the threat from
Ethiopia than that from Marchand’s expedition. Early in 1897 Rennell
Rodd, the British envoy to Menilek, reported that he seemed very much
under French influence; there seemed to be Frenchmen occupying high
posts and assuming higher titles in the Ethiopian administration. In
October the emperor appeared to be co-operating in sending Bonchamps’s
Franco-Ethiopian expedition along the river Sobat to Fashoda. In fact,
Menilek merely intended to play off the French against the British who
seemed a greater threat to his independence. Unknown to them, he had
already made an agreement with the Mahdists. As for the joint expedition
from Addis Ababa to the Nile, Bonchamps complained that 4 the Ethiopians
did not help the mission; they did all they could to stop it from heading
towards the Nile’. 2
If Salisbury had known all this, he need not have troubled to conquer
the rest of the Sudan. But, on the evidence to hand in London, things
looked gloomy indeed. Having reached Berber, Kitchener found the
Mahdists much stronger than expected, and remembering Hicks Pasha’s
catastrophe in the desert, he asked for white troops. Ministers were most
reluctant to send the redcoats. But Macdonald’s force which was to have
covered Fashoda from the south had not even set out, because his troops
had mutinied and the Baganda had rebelled. Like the French strategy in
the east, British strategy in the south had gone astray. There was nothing
for it but to press the conquest of the Sudan from the north. In January
1898, perhaps as much from fear of a mythical Dervish counter-attack as
from fear of the French moving on Fashoda, the British sent Kitchener
his white reinforcements with orders to capture Khartoum. So at last the
1 Memo, by Archinard, 20 January 1896, M.F.O.M., Afrique, 14.
2 Memo, by Bonchamps, ‘Reasons why Junction with Marchand was Impossible’,
n.d., M.F.O.M., Afrique, in, dossier 36 a .
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English army’s imbroglio with the Dervishes dragged them into vast
conquests of unwanted territory in the eastern Sudan, much as the French
army since 1889 had been drawn into the western Sudan by their entangle-
ments with the fighting Muslim theocracies of Amadu and Samori. In the
event the fanaticisms of proto-nationalism had done far more to bring
European imperialism into Africa than all the statesmen and business
interests in Europe.
All these threads came together in the summer of 1898. On 2 September
Kitchener’s machine-guns proved stronger than the Khalifa’s Mahdists at
Khartoum. An Anglo-Egyptian condominium was soon riveted upon the
Sudan. Six weeks earlier a sorely-tried Franco-Ethiopian expedition had
struggled up to the confluence of the Sobat and the Nile near Fashoda,
expecting to find Marchand. He was not there. After a Russian colonel
had planted the French flag on an island in the Nile, they went away.
Three weeks later Marchand himself reached Fashoda. It was deserted.
But not for long. On 19 September Kitchener’s regiments came up the
river in their gunboats and sent him packing.
At first sight it looks as though a British steam-roller had been sent to
crush a peanut at Fashoda. Salisbury had spent millions on building
railways from Lower Egypt and Mombasa through desert and bush to
Lake Victoria and the Upper Nile; he had launched a grand army into the
sands and gone to the verge of war with France — and all to browbeat
eight Frenchmen. Was the Nile sudd worth such exertions? No less an
architect of expansion than Queen Victoria herself opposed a war ‘for so
miserable and small an object’. Yet this anti-climax at Fashoda brought
the climax in Europe. For two months it was touch and go whether
France and Britain would fight each other — not simply for Fashoda but
for what that lonely place symbolised: to the British, safety in Egypt and
in India; to the French, security in the Mediterranean. It was Paris that
gave way. In the turmoil of the Dreyfus Affair, Brisson’s ministry accepted
the necessity of avoiding a naval war which they were in no state to
undertake, even with Russian help. By the Anglo-French Declaration of
March 1899 France was excluded from the entire Nile valley. In return
she received the central Sudan from Darfur in the east to Lake Tchad in
the west. This decided the Egyptian question in a way that the Anglo-
French entente of 1904 merely ratified. With that settled, the drawing of
lines on maps might have ended as it had begun, with Egypt; but it was
too late. By this time there was no more of tropical Africa left to divide.
This central struggle for Egypt and the Nile had produced a series of
side-effects elsewhere in Africa, collateral disputes which had twitched
into a life of their own. Of these much the most virulent was the Anglo-
French rivalry over the middle Niger. During the early 1890’s this affair
was as hollow as it had been during the first decade of the Scramble, with
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tempers on the Niger still blowing hot and cool according to the state of
negotiations over the Nile. Until Kitchener invaded the Mahdist Sudan
and Marchand struck towards Fashoda in retaliation there was little
substance in the West African quarrels. But after 1896 they were more
fiercely contested, as Lugard and the other filibusterers scuffled around the
chiefdoms in the Niger bend. From London’s standpoint, this flurry of
claims and expeditions was a tiresome business, for it had little bearing
on the crucial question of the Nile except as a way of marking up bargain-
ing points for the inevitable settlement there. But the struggle for the
middle Niger had much more meaning for the official mind in Paris,
since its connection with France’s Nile strategy was direct. If the Fashoda
operation were to succeed, there would have to be solid communications
from the West African bases across the Bahr al-Ghazal to this new position
on the Nile. As usual, such calculations decided that all roads must lead
to Lake Tchad. ‘Our chief requirement’, wrote the Minister for Colonies,
‘must be to bind together our possessions in [French] Sudan with those
in the Ubanghi, and the latter with the Nile. Between the Nile and the
Ubanghi matters seem promising . . . between the Ubanghi and the Sudan
we must rely on [fresh] missions if the desired result is to be won.’ 1 Two
ways were tried of carrying out these directives. Pushing up from the
Congo, one force strove to come to terms with Rabih, still the man in
possession of the eastern and southern sides of Tchad. But they found
him far from placable, and in any case the French Congo was too poor
to throw much weight behind the thrust. On the other axis of advance,
Cazemajou was sent from French Sudan to make his way across the Niger
bend to the west side of the lake. But this line of march took him into
Sokoto, trampling down the paper barriers erected in 1890 between the
French and British spheres. At the same time, a support group from
Dahomey threatened to pull Nikki and Borgu out of Goldie’s ramshackle
empire in northern Nigeria.
Briefly, the long line of British surrenders in West Africa was now to
be interrupted. At the Colonial Office, Chamberlain was one of the few
powerful politicians anxious to build an African empire for the sake of
a new imperialism. Whereas the old school approached the partition on
the principle of limited liability which governed all their foreign policy,
Chamberlain believed that a bankrupt rival should be hammered. To
push forward on the Nile, they were ready to fall back on the Niger; but
Chamberlain played for everything or nothing. Having annexed Ashanti
in 1 896, he jostled the French for possession of the Volta chiefdoms beyond.
It was not long before this new forcefulness was warming up the quarrels
on the Niger. To defend Borgu and Sokoto, he screwed up Goldie’s
company into a belligerence as damaging to its dividends as it was distaste-
ful to the diplomats. Cazemajou was to be thrown out of Sokoto by
1 Colonies to Commissioner-General, French Congo, 15 April 1897, A.E.F. 3 D.
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force — a work of supererogation this, since the explorer was already dead.
But for all this fire-eating, there was a treaty. Both sides had their eyes
cocked elsewhere. Salisbury overruled his Colonial Secretary with the
argument that 4 if we break off negotiations ... it will add to our difficulties
in the Nile valley’. Hanotaux calculated that an agreement would stop
Britain employing ‘a policy of grievances and compensations to block
our claim over the Egyptian question’. So on 14 June 1898 they came to
terms, France gaining the Upper Volta and Borgu, while its neighbours,
Ilorin and Sokoto, were reserved to Britain.
So far as London was concerned, this was the end of the West African
affair. Brought to life at the onset of the Egyptian crisis, it could now be
tidily buried before the consummation of that crisis. For Paris, however,
West Africa remained unfinished business, and its consummation was a
necessary part of keeping the Egyptian issue alive. The Lake Tchad
strategy had gone all awry. Settling with the British offered a chance of
securing the Timbuktu-Fashoda route without the interference of Cham-
berlain’s West Africa Frontier Force. While the Anglo-French negotiation
was in full swing, Paris was already organising a force to settle the Tchad
business once and for all : with a certain felicity of timing, this group sailed
for Africa the day after the agreement had been signed. Organised on a
larger scale than the Marchand mission itself, the Voulet-Chanoine mission
was to move east from Timbuktu to Tchad, where they would at last give
Gentil and the Congo government the chance to impose their will on
Rabih. Another expedition, led by Foureau and Lamy across the
Sahara, was also converging on Tchad: it was no part of the main scheme,
but as things turned out, this group was to decide the issue.
Marchand’s fiasco on the Nile knocked the heart out of these plans.
After Fashoda, French opinion was far from favourable to more ad-
ventures in the African bush. Fearing trouble with the Chamber, the
politicians were now inclined to leave Rabih to stew in his own juice.
Even less inclined to take risks, the commissioner-general in the Congo
recommended that France should make a loose agreement with him,
leaving him to do ‘whatever he likes on the left bank of the Benue’. 1 The
news that Voulet and Chanoine had gone mad and shot it out with their
brother officers and then wandered off to found a private empire in the
wastes of the western Sudan made Paris even less anxious to try con-
clusions with their Muslim enemy. But it was the local situation, not the
calculations of Paris, which decided the matter. There was no way of
coming to terms with Rabih; one by one he attacked Gentil, the Sahara
mission and the remnants of the Voulet-Chanoine party. On 21 April
1900 the three groups joined forces. The following day they fought the
battle which settled the Tchad issue, which overthrew Rabih, and which
1 Commissioner-General, French Congo, to Colonies, 24 November 1899, A.E.F.
3D-
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clinched the union of Algeria, the French Sudan and the French Congo.
It was the end of a long story.
In Morocco, Libya and the Congo there were to be further adjustments ;
but these were part of the prelude to the first World War, not of the
scramble. By 1900 the directors of the partition had done with tropical
Africa. It remained for the administrators to make sense of their paper-
work and to make their conquests pay. There could be no going back now.
They had embroiled the nations of Europe and the peoples of Africa in
such a fashion that their destinies were not to be disentangled.
In the i88o’s the policy-makers had intended nothing more ambitidus
than building diplomatic fences around these territories and hamstringing
their rulers by informal control. But such methods would not work with
the proto-nationalists of Egypt and Ethiopia, the Muslim revivalists of
Tunisia and the Sudan, the Arab slavers of Nyasaland and the Congo,
the large animist kingdoms of Buganda and Dahomey. They would not
collaborate. They had to be conquered. Once conquered, they had to be
administered; once administered, they had to be developed, to pay the
bills for their governance. Slowly this development was translated into
the idiom of progress and trusteeship, as the new tints of blue or red or
yellow or green on the African map awakened feelings of pride or shame
among the European voters.
The conversion of the paper empires into working colonies came about
from nothing so rational or purposive as economic planning or imperial
ardours. The outcome of Salisbury’s Nile-valley strategy was as strange
as it had been unforeseen. To pay for the occupation of Egypt and its
Sudan in the early twentieth century, government had to spend public
funds in damming the river and developing Gezira cotton. To recover the
money spent on the Uganda railway, government had to provide it with
payable loads, and this was the sharpest spur for bringing white settlers
into Kenya, as it was for turning the Baganda into cash-crop farmers.
Elsewhere the sequence was the same. The development of French West
Africa under Roume and Ponty did not come until the Government-General
was reorganized to attract capital from France. The German colonies, ac-
quired as by-products of Bismarck’s tacking towards France, remained
derelict until Demburg after 1907 carried out a total reconstruction.
So African territories were launched into a development which had not
been envisaged at the time they were occupied. What was more, govern-
ment itself was forced to take the lead in this. Businessmen were still
unwilling to plunge into African enterprises, and so most of the capital
and the technical services had to be drawn from the public sector. By
now the manoeuvres and blunders of the partition had been rationalised
into apologias for African empire. But the crux of this imperialism lies
in its sequence. It was not businessmen or missionaries or empire-builders
who launched the partition of Africa, but rather a set of diplomats who
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thought of that continent merely as a function of their concerns elsewhere.
But once started off, this paper partition was turned into occupation and
colonisation by the clashes between the Europeans and the proto-national-
ists, the religious revolutionaries of Africa. Only at the end of the process
did the businessmen arrive — when Europe had to foot the bill for having
dealt with Africa as though it was uninhabited. The sequence is quite the
reverse of that postulated in the traditional theories. Imperialism was not
the cause of the partition. It was the result.
As the Egyptian crisis was giving rise to the devious geometry of
partition, an independent process of expansion reached a climax in the
southern sub-continent. Unlike the rest of Africa, the temperate south
was being settled by white men who since the Great Trek had pushed their
homesteads northward from the Orange and the Vaal to the Zambezi
and beyond, subjugating the Bantu as they went. Here, moreover, during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century investors and merchants were
bringing the industrial energies of Europe to develop the colonial economy
on a scale unknown elsewhere in Africa. Colonisation grew dramatically
deeper and wider after the gold discoveries, which brought a swift inflow
of new capital and settlers. Hence the crisis in the south stemmed from
the rapid growth of white colonial society and not, as in the rest of the
continent, from the decay of an oriental empire and its concatenation of
effects. Moreover, it arose from conflicting national aspirations among the
colonists, not from rivalry between the powers. The Anglo-French quarrel
over Egypt, so fateful for the rest, hardly affected this part of Africa.
Occasionally the Germans made as if to intervene, but at most their
contribution to the crisis was marginal. This partition was essentially an
affair of Boer and Briton in South Africa — even more than it was a matter
between the imperial government in London and the colonists — with the
silent Bantu looking on. Yet the South African and Egyptian emergencies
were alike at least in this : neither was set off by new imperial ambitions ;
in both the late-Victorians, striving to uphold an old system of para-
mountcy against a nationalist challenge, fell almost involuntarily into
conquering and occupying more territory. Between their vision and
reality, between the intent and the outcome of their actions, fell the
shadow of imperialism in South, as in North and Central, Africa.
Until the 1870’s official London had been content to secure the Cape
route to India through colonial control of the Cape and Natal, leaving the
inland republics of the Trekboers in the Transvaal and the Orange Free
State their ramshackle independence. But with the diamond discoveries
at Kimberley and the beginnings of investment and railway-building, the
British aim became specifically imperial, as it was not in Egypt or tropical
Africa. Colonisation, which the Colonial Office had tried first to prevent
and then to ignore, had gone so far that there was now nothing for it but
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to bring the dependencies and the republics together into a self-governing
dominion. There were successful models for this kind of imperial archi-
tecture in the Australian responsible governments and the Canadian
Confederation of 1867. Once united under the Union Jack and relieved
of formal Downing Street control, surely the South African colonists’
community of interest with Britain in trade and freedom, if not in kinship
and culture, would keep them also loyal to the empire. Certainly this
technique of collaborating classes worked well in the case of the Cape
Dutch who, as the most anglicised and commercial of the Afrikaners,
were given responsible self-government in 1872. It might have worked
with the Boers of Trans-Orangia. Those of the Transvaal proved far less
amenable. Their trading and cultural links with Britain were of the slightest.
As they had moved farthest to escape imperial rule in the Great Trek, so
were they the most anti-British and inveterately republican of the Boers;
and they had a propensity for inviting foreign powers into South African
affairs. Happily, or so it seemed to Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, Carnarvon,
these twenty thousand Calvinist frontier farmers from seventeenth-century
Europe, bankrupt and ringed round with hostile Bantu, were too few to
hold up the march of nineteenth-century progress. In 1 876 he annexed their
country in an attempt to force them into an imperial federation dominated
by the far wealthier, more populous and more reliable Cape Colony.
But like the Egyptians and Tunisians, the Transvaalers rose three years
later to fight the invaders for their independence; and the illusion of
federation was consumed in the smoke of the first Boer War of 1881.
More than that, the image of imperial aggression awakened among the
Afrikaans-speaking South Africans a feeling of racial solidarity with their
brothers beyond the Vaal. Gladstone’s ministry realised that ‘ the Boers
will resist our rule to the uttermost ... if we conquer the country we can
only hold it by the sword . . . the continuance of the war would have
involved us in a contest with the Free State as well as the Transvaal Boers,
if it did not cause a rebellion in the Cape Colony itself’. Colonial loyalty
had been shaken. Afrikanerdom seemed to be uniting behind Kruger’s
rebellion. To avert a ‘ race war ’ between Boer and Briton, the Liberals
wisely swallowed the humiliation of Majuba and gave back the Trans-
vaalers their republic.
Out of these reactions of Carnarvon’s rough-hewing emerged the modem
Afrikaner national movement, with the annals of the Great Trek as its
myth and ‘Africa for the Afrikaners ’ as its slogan. Hofmeyr’s Farmers’
Protection Association at the Cape coupled with the spread of the Afrikaner
Bond in the Free State and the Transvaal showed how the Boers’ political
consciousness was solidifying. Similarly, the Afrikaans language move-
ment of S. J. du Toit and the predicants of the Dutch Reformed Church
showed how they were preparing to defend their cultural heritage against
anglicisation. Afrikaner nationalism, faced with an empire whose
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liberality toward the Bantu threatened the colonists’ position as a white
aristocracy, was bound to be anti-imperialist; yet its leaders were for the
most part moderates, by no means unwilling to collaborate with the
British authority. But in the Transvaal after the foiled annexation there
developed a nationalism more self-assured and much more extreme.
Increasingly, the Transvaalers turned from the need of South African
unity to the assertion of a romantic particularism, from building a new
nation to wrecking an old empire.
It was not going to be easy for British statesmen to turn this balkanised
South Africa with its militant nationalists into another Canada. There was
no United States on its borders to persuade the Boers that the empire was
the best guarantee of their national identity, as the French Canadians
had been persuaded. And whereas it was the English-speaking majority
who were carrying Canadian colonisation westward to the Pacific, it was
the Afrikaans-speaking majority which was expanding into South
Africa’s hinterland. Downing Street had so much to do in upholding
paramount influence over three Afrikaner-dominated, autonomous
governments that it could only make haste slowly toward making a
dominion. Until 1895 it waited for its colonial collaborators, helped by
the inflow of British capital and immigrants, to bring about an imperial
union from within. It accommodated its policies to the Cape Ministry’s
views, so as to avoid offending its chief ally. The Transvaal was handled
with kid gloves lest open quarrels with its nationalists should unite Afri-
kanerdom against the empire, as it had threatened to do in 1881. In con-
ciliating the colonies and republics alike, the ‘Imperial Factor’ in South
Africa was progressively dismantled in favour of the politics of ‘moral
influence’, in all respects but one: London intervened to help the colonies’
expansion and to hinder that of the republics, so as to ensure a pre-
ponderance of imperial elements in the ultimate federation.
Everything therefore depended on keeping the South African balance
favourable to the Cape Colony’s future. When Bismarck disturbed it in
1884 by proclaiming his protectorate over Angra Pequena, the British
listened to the pleas of Cape Town and quickly brought Bechuanaland
and St Lucia Bay under imperial control, thus blocking a German junction
with the Transvaalers. Ironically, however, it was not German diplomacy
but British capital, pouring into the Transvaal to exploit the gold rushes
on the Witwatersrand, that turned the balance against the Cape in favour
of the republic. Toward the end of the 1880’s the turn was already visible.
As the centre of South African prosperity began to shift from the ports to
the republic’s gold-mines, the colonies frantically pushed their railways
northward to catch the new Eldorado’s trade. It was plain that their
revenue and their farmers would soon depend mainly upon the Transvaal
market. Kruger’s government on the other hand preferred to apply its
new economic power to the strengthening of republicanism throughout
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South Africa. At the cost of antagonising the Afrikaner Bond at the Cape,
he shut the Cape railway out of the Rand, while using his new riches on
building a line to Delagoa Bay that would release the republic from the
thraldom of colonial ports and dues . Out of this economic revolution, there
followed the long struggle for survival, fought with tariffs, railways and
territorial claims, in which the Cape financial and mercantile interests
extended their system northward in search of a future. Encircled with
colonial railways and new English-speaking settlements, the Transvaal
was to be forced or cajoled into a favourable commercial union.
It was this surge of colonisation and capital, this commercial civil war
in the south, that drove the scramble for territory northward to the Zam-
bezi, and onwards to Lake Nyasa and the southern boundary of the Congo
Free State. Here was empire-building with a vengeance, whose like was
to be found nowhere else on the continent. Yet if not cyphers, the men of
Whitehall were little more than helpless auxiliaries in it. They were denied
by Parliament the price of a protectorate or a colonial railway. The idea,
the millions, the political fixing in London and Cape Town, in short the
main impetus, was supplied from the craggy genius of Cecil Rhodes.
With the impregnable credit of Rothschild’s, De Beers and the Consolidated
Gold Fields at his back, he knew as well as Leopold II himself how to put
big business to work in politics and politics to work for big business —
without putting off the shining armour of idealism. He thought big with-
out thinking twice, and yet carried out schemes much larger than his words.
A financier with no time for balance sheets but with time for dreams,
awkwardly inarticulate, but excelling as a politician, passing as an Afrikaner
in South Africa, an imperialist in London, his passionate belief in himself
and the destiny of South Africa left him innocent of inconsistency.
When his prospectors told him in 1887 that the gold of Matabeleland
would prove as rich as that of Johannesburg, he set about acquiring it — as
a way of ‘get[ting] a united S. Africa under the English flag’. ‘If’, he
decided, ‘we get Matabeleland we shall get the balance of Africa.’ That
was characteristic. And he persuaded Salisbury’s government of it. That
was characteristic too. Hope of another Rand and a strong British colony
in Lobengula’s kingdom which would offset the rise of the Transvaal
moved ministers to charter Rhodes’s South Africa Company in 1889.
Part of the bargain was that he should extend the Cape railways through
Bechuanaland and relieve the burden of this pauper protectorate on the
Treasury; its essence was that Rhodes under one or other of his twenty
different hats should do and pay for everything. Fearful of an anti-
imperialist Parliament, suspecting the loyalty of Cape ministries under
the shadow of the Bond, the imperial authorities saw no alternative but
to play the King of Diamonds. Only Rhodes could make the imperial
counterpoise in the north : he alone, first as Hofmeyr’s political ally and
soon as Cape premier, could keep the Bond faithful in the struggle for
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supremacy in South Africa. The intransigence of Kruger and his nationalist
burghers forced Rhodes to pay the piper but it allowed him to call his
own tune. At his insistence Salisbury elbowed aside Portugal’s claims
and Queen Victoria’s protests, taking northern as well as southern
Rhodesia for the South Africa Company in 1890, instead of letting it go
as he first intended. Moreover, it was Rhodes’s cheque-book that enabled
Salisbury to throw a protectorate over Nyasaland in 1 89 1 and save the land
of Livingstone from the Catholic Portuguese advance. Henceforward
Whitehall clung to the coat-tails of the Colossus who had become almost
an ‘ independent power ’ in southern Africa. For them the problem was not
one of promoting British trade and investment, but of shaping to their
fixed imperial design the intrinsically neutral movement of colonists and
capital. The danger of provoking Afrikaner nationalism stopped them
from doing this directly, even if they had had the money. Rhodes not only
had the purse, he was the leading Cape Afrikaner. He must do it for them.
But by 1895 all the Cape premier’s projecting looked like failing. The
fabled gold of Matabeleland had not materialised, but in the Transvaal
the deep levels had proved profitable and practically inexhaustible. The
settlers who might have colonised Rhodesia were joining the Uitlanders
of Johannesburg instead. For a long time to come, the counterpoise
across the Limpopo would be a mere featherweight in the imperial scale.
Shares in the Bechuanaland railway and the South Africa Company
slumped, while Witwatersrand issues boomed. After forty years in which
the empire-builders had been working for a dominion founded upon Cape
colonial supremacy, it was now certain that the real stone of union lay
out of reach in the Transvaal republic. In 1894 Kruger opened his Delagoa
Bay railway and, though the Cape now had a line running to the Rand,
the Colony’s share of the traffic and trade dwindled, as the lion’s share
went increasingly to the Transvaal and Natal. A year later, the battle of
railways and tariffs almost brought the Colony and Republic to blows
in the Drifts crisis, but no threat could force the Transvaalers into a
commercial union on Rhodes’s terms. Kruger held every advantage and
he knew it. The true Rand together with the Delagoa Railway was raising
him to be arbiter over the colonies’ commercial future. Rhodes and
Chamberlain suspected that he would arbitrate for a republic of South
Africa. They set out to topple him.
Toward the end of 1895 Rhodes organised a rising of the Uitlanders in
Johannesburg, It was a fiasco. Worse than that, Dr Jameson’s Raid
exposed the conspiracy and implicated the imperial authorities. Through-
out South Africa, Afrikaner nationalists came together once more against
British aggression. At Cape Town, Rhodes fell from office and the govern-
ment came into the grip of the antagonised Bond. In the Free State, the
moderates were replaced by sterner nationalists who soon made a far-
reaching alliance with the Transvaal. Afrikaners in the Cape, the Orange
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Free State and the Transvaal stood united in defence of republicanism.
Germany was giving Kruger cautious diplomatic support, hoping to lever
Britain closer to the Triple Alliance. If the Rand had turned the economic
balance, Rhodes had swung the political scale against an imperial future.
This cataclysmic view was not that of Rhodes alone. The High
Commissioners, Robinson and Milner, and the Colonial ministers,
Chamberlain and Selbome, shared it. Early in 1 896 the latter were per-
suaded that the Transvaal must be absorbed quickly into ‘ a Confederacy
on the model of the Dominion of Canada. . .under the British flag’;
otherwise it would ‘inevitably amalgamate [the Colonies] ... into a
[republican] United States of South Africa’. About this vehement thesis
the rest of the cabinet were highly sceptical. Recalling the reactions of
Afrikaner nationalism to the first Boer War, they suspected that, however
low colonial fortunes had fallen, a second war would lose the whole of
South Africa for the empire. Such a struggle, moreover, would be extremely
unpopular in Britain. The Salisbury ministry resolved to bring Kruger
to reason through external pressure alone — perhaps by obtaining
possession of Delagoa Bay; perhaps by squaring the Germans; perhaps by
using threat and bluff to get the vote for the Uitlanders; by any means
short of war to bring the Rand into a South African commercial union.
Their efforts to avert a crash repeated Gladstone’s over Arabi. But once
more events took charge, and the outcome belied the intent. In using the
severer weapons of ‘moral suasion’ called for by Rhodes and the extreme
colonial party in South Africa, whose loyalty as their last remaining
collaborators they dared not lose, the British government followed them
over the edge of war. And like Arabi before him, it was Kruger who
finally declared it. Gladstone’s ministry had not realised their blunder
in Egypt until after the event; unhappily Salisbury’s knew theirs in South
Africa beforehand. Hicks-Beach protested: ‘I hope Milner and the
Uitlanders will not be allowed to drag us into war. ’ Ruefully the Prime
Minister admitted that they had. He foresaw with pitiless clarity the
vengeance that Afrikaner nationalism would take upon the imperial
cause. On the eve of the second Boer War in August 1899 he predicted:
‘The Boers will hate you for a generation, even if they submit If they
resist and are beaten, they will hate you still more — But it recks little to
think of that. What [Milner] has done cannot be effaced. . .and all for
people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and
no power to England.’
Hence the taking of the Rhodesias and the conquest of the Transvaal
came about from a process of colonisation in which the struggles between
Afrikaners and British nationalists had receded beyond imperial control.
Once economic development had raised the enemies of the imperial
connection to preponderance over the colonial collaborators, the govern-
ment in London attempted diplomatically to switch back South Africa on
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to imperial lines. But in trying to make it into another Canada, they only
created another Ireland. From this standpoint it was a case of mistaken
identity. But the mistake went deeper than this : in the end they went to
war for the obsolete notion of imperial supremacy in a Dominion — for a
cause which was already a grand illusion.
Despite the astounding games of partition it played with the maps of
Asia and Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called new
imperialism was merely a second-order effect of the earlier work of
European expansion. Colonising the Americas and the other white
dominions had been a durable achievement, constructed out of the man-
power, the capital and the culture of the lands on the Atlantic seaboard.
By this time their growth in self-sufficiency was throwing them outside the
orbit of European control, whatever relics of that overlordship might still
exist on paper, or might still be fleetingly reasserted by force of arms. Yet
far from this being a period of decay for Europe, its energies were now
developing their maximum thrust. The potential of the old colonies of
settlement had matured so far that they were generating local expansions
of their own. The Canadians and Brazilians had organized their backlands.
The Americans and Australians had spilled out into the Pacific. The South
Africans had driven north of the Zambezi. Whatever the flag, whatever
the guise, the expansive energies of Europe were still making permanent
gains for western civilisation and its derivatives.
None of this was true of the gaudy empires spatch-cocked together in
Asia and Africa. The advances of this new imperialism were mainly designed
to plaster over the cracks in the old empires. They were linked only
obliquely to the expansive impulses of Europe. They were not the objects
of serious national attention. They have fallen to pieces only three-quarters
of a century after being thrown together. It would be a gullible historio-
graphy which could see such gimcrack creations as necessary functions of
the balance of power or as the highest stage of capitalism.
Nevertheless, the new imperialism has been a factor of the first im-
portance for Asia and Africa. One of the side-effects of European
expansion had been to wear down or to crack open the casings of societies
governed hitherto by traditional modes. Towards the end of the nineteenth
century this had produced a social mobility which the westerners now
feared to sanction and did not dare to exploit by the old method of backing
the most dynamic of the emergent groups. Frontiers were pushed deeper
and deeper into these two continents, but the confident calculus of early
nineteenth-century expansion was over and done with.
It is true that the West had now advanced so far afield that there was less
scope for creative interventions of the old kind. The Russians had as little
chance of fruitful collaboration with the Muslim emirs of Khiva and
Bokhara as the French and British were to have with the theocrats of the
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Sudan. When the time of troubles came to the peoples of China or Tong-
king or Fiji, their first response was to rally around the dynasty, just as in
Africa the Moroccans and Ethiopians were to group under the charisma
of the ruler. Movements of this sort were proto-nationalist in their results,
but they were romantic, reactionary struggles against the facts, the passion-
ate protests of societies which were shocked by the new age of change and
would not be comforted. But there were more positive responses to the
western question. The defter nationalisms of Egypt and the Levant, the
‘Scholars of New Learning’ in Kuang-Hsu China, the sections which
merged into the continental coalition of the Indian Congress, the separatist
churches of Africa — in their different ways, they all planned to re-form
their personalities and regain their powers by operating in the idiom of
the westerners.
The responses might vary, but all these movements belonged to a
common trend. However widely the potentials might range between
savage resistance and sophisticated collaboration, each and every one of
them contained growth points. In cuffing them out of the postures of
tradition and into the exchange economy and the bureaucratic state,
western strength hustled them into transformation. One by one, they
were exposed to rapid social change, and with it came conflicts between
rulers and subjects, the rise of new elites, the transforming of values. All
that the West could hear in this was distress signals. But just as its
ethnocentric bias has obscured the analysis of imperialism, so its Darwin-
ism has stressed the signs of decrepitude and crack-up in these societies
at the cost of masking their growth points.
In dealing with these proto-nationalist awakenings, Europe was lured
into its so-called age of imperialism; from them, the modern struggles
against foreign rule were later to emerge. But the idiom has hidden the
essence. Imperialism has been the engine of social change, but colonial
nationalism has been its auxiliary. Between them, they have contrived a
world revolution. Nationalism has been the continuation of imperialism
by other means.
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CHAPTER XXIII
EXPANSION IN THE PACIFIC AND
THE SCRAMBLE FOR CHINA
I n the first place and for a long time the increasing pressure for expan-
sion in the Pacific and China areas which was so prominent a feature
of the last third of the nineteenth century did not come from the
European governments. Before 1894 it came almost entirely from Asian
governments and their foreign advisers or from European settlers and
officials in Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific islands and Asia. For
special reasons the latter received strong official support from Europe for
a brief period between 1882 and 1885; but apart from this the European
governments remained reluctant to extend their responsibilities and their
rivalries to this area until the last few years of the century.
Among the earliest problems to arise in the area were those created by
the expansion of European trade and settlement in some of the Pacific
islands. Clashes between Europeans and between Europeans and natives
were becoming serious as early as 1870 in consequence of the growth of
trade and plantation agriculture, the improvement of communications and
the effect of these developments in dislocating native social and political
systems. In Fiji the British Colonial Office had already rejected, twelve
years before, a suggestion from the British settlers, who were also afraid
of annexation by France, that these problems should be solved by annexa-
tion by Great Britain. It had felt reluctant to risk a quarrel with France.
Since then the number of settlers, predominantly British, engaged in trade
and cotton production had continued to grow despite the lack of effective
government and increasing disorder. In 1870 several hundred British
subjects living there again petitioned that England should annex the
islands. At the same time native chiefs petitioned England to establish a
protectorate and help them set up a modem native government, as the
United States had done in Hawaii. Native offers of cession were also made
to the United States and Germany. There was no response to these
appeals; all the home governments still had the same desire to avoid the
expense and responsibilities of additional colonies.
The Australian and New Zealand colonies were more familiar with the
growing disorder in the islands, more fearful of the expansion of other
major powers in the south Pacific and less concerned than Great Britain
with problems in Europe. Many of the Australians were frankly imperi-
alistic. The Reverend John Lang of Sydney, the author of a book urging
the establishment of British sovereignty over most of the islands of the
south-west Pacific, had already advocated that the legislative assembly of
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New South Wales should annex Fiji without authority from Britain.
Many Australians feared that other powers might act before Britain, to
the detriment of Australian and New Zealand interests, and many were
also convinced that trade in the islands required effective government to
protect it and halt abuses by British adventurers. An intercolonial con-
ference of the Australian and New Zealand colonies, meeting in Melbourne
in 1870, resolved in favour of a British protectorate for Fiji. The resolu-
tion was forwarded by the governor of Victoria. Like the petitions from
Fiji itself, it was rejected by the British Colonial Office. The Colonial
Secretary added that he might support a proposal for the administration of
Fiji by New South Wales, but the New South Wales cabinet, while
strongly urging annexation by Britain, was itself opposed to any such
proposal.
Political changes in Fiji then provided an escape from the situation.
A modern native government in which British merchants were dominant
was set up in 1871 after four unsuccessful attempts in the previous six
years. The British government gave this, the Woods government, de facto
recognition in order to ward off the necessity of intervention. This move
was deplored by New South Wales, which considered annexation essen-
tial; the British consul was himself hostile toward the Fijian government;
many settlers resisted its authority. The continued unrest threatened the
copra and cotton enterprises in which Australian interests were consider-
able. Meanwhile the missionaries, who were influential in English politics,
came to support annexation as a means of protecting native welfare,
particularly against the abuses of labour recruitment which were inciting
anti-European outbreaks in the neighbouring islands. By 1873 for all
these reasons the impotence of the Woods government became patent,
and conditions were so bad that, although it was especially unfavourable
to colonial expansion, the Liberal government in England sent a com-
mission of inquiry to Fiji in 1874. Contrary to instructions the commis-
sioners accepted from the native chiefs another offer of cession to Britain.
At about the same time there was a change of government in England and
the new. Conservative, cabinet finally decided on the acquisition of Fiji as
the only means of restoring order to an area invaded by English capital
and English lawlessness. Although the chiefs were reluctant to accept un-
conditional cession, their earlier offers were taken up without regard to their
conditions and Fiji became a British Crown Colony on 2 January 1875.
New Zealand was even more imperialistic with regard to Samoa than
Australia had become over Fiji. The problems in the two areas were
similar, but the existence of extensive German and American interests
made a unilateral solution of the Samoan problems impossible. Germans
had the largest land-holdings, mainly devoted to copra production, and
Samoa had been the site of their first overseas development. New Zealand
had neither trade nor investment in Samoa, but in 1872 Julius Vogel, the
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Premier, recommended that Samoa be annexed by Great Britain as vital
to New Zealand’s safety, and pointed to an American attempt to obtain a
naval harbour at Pago Pago as proof of the danger from rival powers. In
1874 he proposed a New Zealand government development company for
Samoa. His suggestions found no favour with the British Colonial Office.
This did not diminish New Zealand’s interest in annexing Samoa with
British assistance, although her aspirations were to remain unfulfilled for
another half-century.
American interest in Samoa was not a figment of Vogel’s imagination.
In 1872 Commander Meade of the United States navy was persuaded to
conclude a treaty with a local chief by a Californian promoter who had
acquired land-rights on Pago Pago harbour, the best in Samoa. In return
for American protection the chief conferred on the United States the
exclusive privilege of establishing a naval station. This treaty had not been
authorised by the American government, but President Grant approved
it. Another Californian acquired land-rights around the harbour and
persuaded local chiefs to petition for annexation to the United States.
Because of the President’s interest in a protectorate, the Secretary of State
sent Colonel Albert Steinberger to Samoa on a confidential basis to report
on conditions. When Steinberger arrived in 1873, he was warmly wel-
comed by both natives and foreigners, who both hoped for annexation.
He assisted in drafting a constitution to set up a modernised native
government.
In America, as in Great Britain, there was little sentiment for inter-
vention in Samoa. The Senate rejected the Meade treaty, the offers of
annexation were refused, and while Congress affirmed the policy of non-
intervention, the press strongly criticised the President. Yet Steinberger
was permitted to go again to Samoa at his own expense with some gifts to
the chiefs from President Grant and to become the king’s chief minister.
He organised a relatively efficient government which was able to keep
peace. But it soon grew unpopular because it was accused of being too
favourable toward the natives, and when they discovered that Steinberger
had no American governmental support, the British and American consuls
secured his deportation through their influence on the Samoan king. Civil
war again broke out and the king was deposed in the disorder resulting
from this intervention against Steinberger, which was as unauthorised as
his own activities had been.
Hitherto, Germany had also withheld official support from private
ventures overseas, in Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea and elsewhere. But the
Chancellor, Bismarck, began to be dissatisfied with the treatment of
German interests when the British refused to entertain any German
claims arising from the annexation of Fiji. When a Samoan delegation
went to Washington in 1878 and there negotiated a treaty for the cession
of Pago Pago in return for American good offices, the Germans were
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again disagreeably impressed; and they sent two warships into two
Samoan harbours to help them to obtain a favourable treaty for them-
selves. Great Britain then felt compelled to negotiate a treaty with the
faction in Samoa which happened to be dominant in 1879. All these
treaties provided for jurisdiction by consuls over their own nationals as
well as giving rights to establish naval stations and coaling depots. The
German, American, and British consuls also set up a neutral area by a
convention which they signed in 1 879 and which gave them control of the
principal town of Apia. These steps failed to solve the problem of disorder
and civil war. Partial intervention by foreign governments proved an
obstacle to native administration or reform, and the presence of several
foreign contingents, while preserving the nominal independence of
Samoa, meant that no one foreign country could exercise control. Civil
war continued among the natives in which foreigners often actively inter-
vened. The political structure of the islands was such that disputes among
rival claimants to the paramount chieftaincy offered ample scope for
rivalry between European supporters of the various pretenders.
The German government’s new willingness to support its nationals in
Samoa received a sharp setback in the German parliament. A bill to
enable the government to subsidise the large German company Godeffroy
and Sons was defeated, and the company had to be hastily reorganised to
save it from the hands of English creditors. Although imperialistic senti-
ment was beginning to appear among German overseas settlers and
officials, party and public opposition in Germany to colonial commit-
ments continued, and the German government did not oppose a new move
for the annexation of Samoa by Great Britain which was made by British
settlers in 1880. The British Foreign Office, for its part, again concluded
that annexation would be inexpedient. British, like American and Ger-
man, expansionist sentiment was still held within narrow limits by popular
opposition to overseas responsibilities and expense and by official reluct-
ance to incur either the expense or the risk of friction with other powers.
Even while these difficulties were arising in the islands, more serious
problems had emerged on China’s borders, the consequence of the decline
of the Chinese state, of the revolution in Japanese society and of the
anxiety of both China and Japan on the score of European penetration into
the Far East. China was surrounded by lands which had formed almost
a system of states. In Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and Vietnam 1 the rulers
were still confirmed in their titles by the Chinese emperor, and they still
sent periodic missions to Peking bearing tribute in acknowledgement of
1 Until recently, usually referred to as Annam or included in the area called Indo-China.
The name ‘Vietnam’ has been used by the people since early times; it is the most accurate
and inclusive designation for the country. For the divisions of the country, including
Annam, see p. 650.
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China’s superiority. These missions offered an opportunity for trade and
exchange of information and reinforced cultural and sentimental ties. In
reality, however, the tributary states had become independent, managing
their own affairs. Partly for this reason but mainly because she was
increasingly alarmed by the expansion of foreign countries both into these
neighbouring tributary states and into border areas not firmly held by her,
China now felt compelled to send military aid, claim sovereignty or
expand her own control there in the vain attempt to check hostile rivals.
Her motives in the north Pacific resembled those of Australia and New
Zealand in the islands of the south Pacific : she was trying to anticipate or
prevent the expansion of other powers.
Japan, the other power most immediately concerned, had also for a long
time watched the steady expansion of the European powers and the
United States in her direction. Soejima Taneomi, who took office as
Foreign Minister in 1871, thought Japan would be in a better strategic
position if she controlled an arc of territory from Formosa and the
Ryukyus to Japan and Korea. Like China and like Australia and New
Zealand, Japan sought control of neighbouring territories in order to gain
a good position for defence and to deny them to rivals. The territories
flanking Japan also provided a strong position from which she might
influence China and the continent.
Her opportunity to control the Ryukyu Islands arose as a result of
Japanese political reforms. The Ryukyu king was accustomed to send
tribute to the Japanese feudal lord of Satsuma as well as to the Chinese
emperor, although the islands were really quite independent and preferred
to stay so. When the Japanese central government enforced the surrender
of the fiefs and reorganised the country into prefectures in 1871, the
Ryukyus were placed nominally under the emperor, the king was given a
pension and a mansion in Tokyo, and the United States, France and
Holland, who had signed treaties with the islands, were told that Japan
would assume the obligations incurred by the treaties. By this means, and
without opposition, Japan began the process of establishing sovereignty
in the modem sense over the islands.
The problem of the Ryukyus became involved with that of Formosa,
which was administered as a part of China, when Ryukyu fishermen were
shipwrecked in the less settled part and killed by the natives. One of the
factions in the government of Japan decided to send an expedition to
punish the natives and occupy their part of the islands, which was lightly
held by China. Le Gendre, a former member of an American punitive
expedition to Formosa, was introduced by the American Minister in
Tokyo to Soejima. The Japanese Foreign Minister hired his services, even
promising to make him a general and governor if Japan occupied the
island permanently, and took him with him on a mission to China in 1873.
The ostensible purpose of the mission was to exchange ratification of the
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long delayed Sino-Japanese Treaty of commerce and friendship and to
congratulate the Chinese emperor on his marriage and accession to the
throne. Soejima’s real purpose was indicated in a report to the throne:
‘I shall not let the foreigners who covet Formosa deter me, but shall
persuade the Chinese to concede the native territory. We shall develop it
and win the hearts of the people. If I cannot do it, it probably cannot be
done.’ But he does not seem to have discussed the matter of an expedition
to Formosa, let alone to have gained Chinese agreement to Japanese
occupation of the island. He raised the question of the Ryukyus but the
Chinese officials insisted that they were still under Chinese sovereignty.
Before the Formosan question was resolved, the matter of Korea
became of extreme importance in Japan. Increasingly bad relations with
Korea had roused nationalistic elements in Japan to a fever pitch. The
Koreans were, if anything, more anti-foreign than the Vietnamese, the
Chinese and the Japanese themselves. They were therefore suspicious of
Japan’s reforms and her good relations with foreign powers, and they also
held it against Japan that she had permitted France to use troops garri-
soned in Japan for an attack upon Korea in 1866. On Japan’s side many
of the leaders were influenced by the feeling that expansion in China and
Korea would strengthen the country against the encroachment of the
West. They were adopting European methods and institutions not from
any love of foreigners but to safeguard themselves from foreign control.
In addition, the abolition of the Japanese feudal system had left a large
number of former military retainers without the resources or skills to
adjust to the new society that was being created, and some of the govern-
ment leaders, themselves opposed to the speed of Japan’s modernisation,
sympathised with their distress. A faction led by Saigo Takamori advo-
cated military conquest as a means of strengthening Japan, utilising the
former warrior class and making rapid reform much less necessary. Saigo
proposed to go as an envoy to Korea and to get himself murdered there in
order to provide a cause for war. This plan for war with Korea was
substantially approved in 1873, but its implementation was delayed until
the return of the Iwakura mission, which had gone abroad to investigate
world conditions.
News of the decision to attack Korea brought the mission hurrying
home from Europe and its return precipitated a crisis. Its members, the
heads of another faction, felt that an expansionist policy was impractic-
able in view of the overwhelming superiority of the foreign powers and
Japan’s financial weakness. In one of the most crucial policy decisions of
modern times, on 14 October 1873, Iwakura and his chief ally, Okubo
Toshimichi, succeeded in cancelling the attack upon Korea. Saigo and
the war party, which included Soejima, resigned. The new policy, like that
of Germany after 1870, was to be conciliation abroad and concentration
on internal unification, development, and reform.
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The expedition to Formosa proved more difficult to cancel. The new
Foreign Minister did his best to postpone it. The American government
recalled the American Minister in Tokyo for his part in encouraging
Japanese expansion in Korea and Formosa; it sought to withdraw
American citizens such as Le Gendre from the enterprise and to prevent
American ships from being used. But the younger brother of Saigo
Takamori, Saigo Tsugumichi, who had been made commander of the
Formosan expedition, continued to prepare it in the south of Japan,
where the expansionists were most influential; and although Okubo
Toshimichi, who became the leading member of the internal development
faction, even went to the south in an attempt to halt it, Saigo Tsugumichi
sailed off after declaring that the government could consider him a free-
booter if it wished. Okubo went to China to solve the difficulty caused by
Saigo’s expedition. Only after mediation by the British Minister to China
was he successful in obtaining a settlement in 1874. He obtained a money
payment for the families of the Ryukyu fishermen killed in Formosa and
also the expenses of the expedition. With this solution he was able to
persuade Saigo to withdraw from Formosa after some rather inconclusive
operations against the natives.
Since the Ryukyu sailors were referred to as Japanese subjects in these
negotiations with China, Japan had taken an important step in strengthen-
ing its claim to the Ryukyus. The islands continued to be the subject of
sharp dispute with China, who maintained that she was sovereign there,
but China was unable to assert herself. Japan eventually incorporated the
islands into her local government system in 1879, and Chinese protests
proved ineffective.
Japan also succeeded in expanding and fixing her boundaries elsewhere.
In 1875 an agreement was reached with Russia whereby Japan abandoned
her claims to Sakhalin Island to the north and Russia acknowledged
Japan’s title to the Kurile Islands. In 1873 the United States abandoned
her claims to the Bonin Islands directly south of Japan, as did Britain, in
Japan’s favour.
During the 1880’s, although expansionist forces from within the Pacific
area were far from having spent themselves, more serious interest in the
area was shown by European governments, if only for a brief period and
if only because conditions in Europe temporarily favoured England’s rivals
and encouraged them to clash with her. In the Far East, as in the in-
creasingly sharp struggle in Africa, Bismarck’s diplomatic successes — the
renewal of the Three Emperors’ Alliance of Germany, Russia and Austria
and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy — strengthened
Germany. France was led by a strong premier, Jules Ferry, who was
convinced of France’s need for new colonies, indignant at the British
occupation of Egypt and, more important, willing to co-operate with
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Germany. England had problems in Egypt and had been so tardy in
modernising her fleet that France and Germany probably outnumbered
her in first-class ships.
It was for these reasons that Germany clashed with Australian and New
Zealand interests in the Pacific islands and that Great Britain was in a
weak position when the clash occurred. The trouble began over New
Guinea. New South Wales had strongly recommended the annexation by
Great Britain of the unclaimed portion of New Guinea on several occa-
sions. The Colonial Office had refused to consider this proposal in 1875,
1878, and again in 1882. After 1880 German planters had begun to
develop the north-east coast and an intense local struggle had set in
between them and British settlers. On 4 April 1 883 the colony of Queens-
land proclaimed possession of eastern New Guinea despite the fact that as
late as the previous January the German government had disclaimed any
plans for occupation or political control. With the support of the other
Australian colonies the governor offered to pay the expenses of administra-
tion. This move was immediately disallowed by England as illegal and as
offensive to Germany. Great Britain’s action in its turn prompted the
New Zealand parliament, with its eye on Samoa, to pass a federation act
to facilitate ‘steps for the establishment of its rule over such islands of the
Pacific as are not already occupied by or under the protection of a foreign
power, and the occupation of which by any foreign power would be
detrimental to the interests of Australasia’. The British government invali-
dated this act by withholding the royal assent. Queensland then proposed
an intercolonial conference which met in November and December 1883
to consider federation with a view to exerting more influence upon the
home government and to discussing the annexation of Pacific islands.
Fiji as well as New Zealand and the Australian colonies sent representa-
tives. The conference resolved that ‘the further acquisition of dominion in
the Pacific south of the equator by any foreign power would be highly
detrimental to the safety and well-being of the British possessions in
Australasia and injurious to the interests of the empire’.
Germany, or at least German settlers, took alarm at all this activity.
The German New Guinea Company was organised in May of 1884; its
representatives sought to obtain land in New Guinea. German settlers
there then raised their flag on 20 August and their claims were supported
by Berlin. The German ambassador in London urged the desirability of
a German protectorate for the sake of trade in New Guinea. The British
government also took a stand in reply to Germany’s. It had deplored the
hasty activities of the governments of its own colonies but could not let
the German initiative go unopposed. The British Foreign Secretary
informed Germany that Britain was not opposed to German colonisation
of unoccupied South Pacific islands, but that part of New Guinea, of
interest to the Australian colonies, would be claimed by Great Britain.
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While discussions were proceeding in Europe, the German government
permitted its company to act as though the territory were to be German
in October.
The Australians were upset by the German steps toward annexation,
and so was the British government. But the Liberal cabinet in London,
surprised by the danger of the continental coalition with which Bismarck
now threatened it and in need of German goodwill in the matter of the
Egyptian debt, had been caught off its guard. It had to give way in New
Guinea. Bismarck on his side was prepared to compromise: although he
was incensed by the British persistence in opposing Germany’s colonial
aims, he had overestimated the extent to which colonial pressure could
force Great Britain to meet his wishes in Europe, which was more im-
portant to him than colonies, and became wary of driving her too far. On
6 April 1885 a joint declaration fixed the limits of the spheres of influence
of Great Britain and Germany in the western Pacific. German territory
in north-east New Guinea and nearby islands and British territory in
south-east New Guinea were mutually recognised. Britain did, therefore,
obtain some territory, but not all that the colonies desired, nor did she
prevent the expansion of Germany into their vicinity, which was what they
had most feared.
Meanwhile in November 1884 the Samoan chiefs had again petitioned
for annexation by either Britain or New Zealand, and New Zealand had
asked London to permit her to annex Samoa and Tonga. She also offered
to take over responsibility for Fiji as well. Unfortunately, the general
British-German settlement which was just being reached stipulated that
neither power would interfere in Tonga or Samoa, and it could not be
upset. Later, in 1889, the Berlin Act signed by Britain, Germany and the
United States reaffirmed Samoan independence except for American
rights at Pago Pago. The islands continued under the joint protectorate of
the three powers, a system which worked badly in practice. It offered too
much scope for two of the protecting powers to line up against the third.
The alignment was usually Britain and the United States against Germany,
primarily because Germany, with the largest share of the commerce of the
islands, claimed a supremacy which the other powers had a common
interest in denying her; but this alignment was modified by the desire of
Britain not to offend Germany, and of the United States not to be seen in
co-operation with Britain. Many Americans disliked even this degree of
involvement. The Tripartite protectorate was regarded by them as a first,
and unnecessary, departure from the good old principle of avoiding
entangling alliances.
The same complication did not arise in connection with the increasing
American interest in Hawaii. In 1875 the United States had concluded
with the king of Hawaii a reciprocity treaty which gave both nations
exclusive trading privileges and guaranteed the independence of the
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islands against any third party. The guarantee was hardly a real one.
Although Hawaii had been under British rule for a few months in 1863,
and although both Britain and France retained an interest, the real chal-
lenge to the islands’ independence came from the United States herself.
American money poured into their sugar industry, and their trade was
virtually pre-empted to the United States. In 1887 the United States
leased Pearl Harbour as a naval base. American commercial dominance
continued until Queen Liliuokalani, who came to the throne in 1891,
attempted to challenge it. Her efforts produced a swift reaction in the
shape of her deposition by a provisional government of public safety in
January 1893, which began to negotiate for annexation to the United
States.
Benjamin Harrison was in the last months of his presidency. He
favoured annexation, but before a treaty could be ratified he had been
replaced by Grover Cleveland. Cleveland had himself admitted the im-
portance of the islands to the United States, but he was a staunch anti-
imperialist, suspicious of the whole affair, and doubly suspicious of
anything in which Harrison had had a hand. He withdrew the treaty of
annexation from the Senate; but he could not reverse the Hawaiian
revolution. He was forced in time to recognise the provisional govern-
ment of Hawaii as permanent. It was the prelude to annexation, which
finally took place in 1898.
Meanwhile, in 1882, another European government had begun to
show an increased interest in the China area. France had conquered the
southern portion of Vietnam, known as Cochin-China, in the 1860’s,
when the central part, Annam, and the northern part, Tongking, had
remained independent and tributary to China. Subsequent activity by
Europeans in Tongking had been mainly the result of the initiative of
Frenchmen on the spot. In March 1873 Vietnamese officials had sought
to prevent the illegal export of salt into China from Tongking by the
French merchant Jean Dupuis. With his company of one hundred and
seventy-five men he had seized the port of Hanoi and appealed to Admiral
Dupre, governor of Cochin-China, for aid. Dupre had written at this
time : ‘ To establish ourselves in the rich country bordering on China is a
question of life and death for the future of our rule in the Far East.’
Though cautioned by Paris not to cause international complications in
Tongking, he had sent a small force to Hanoi in August in order, as he
told the Vietnamese emperor, to evict Dupuis. As soon as the French
troops saw how weak the Vietnamese were, they had seized Tongking.
When Dupre was killed in December by the forces of Liu Yung-fu, a
former Chinese rebel leader, employed by the Vietnamese to keep order in
the north, Paris had asserted itself and ordered withdrawal from Tongking.
But a treaty had been signed with the Chinese emperor on 15 March 1874
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which permitted the French to trade and maintain small garrisons in the
trading ports in Tongking; and in an attempt to dissolve the link with
China it had provided that Vietnam would apply to France for protection
when needed.
In 1882 the French government permitted 400 men secretly to reinforce
the small French garrison in Tongking for the purpose of pacifying the
pirates there. These troops seized Hanoi in April. Under the prodding of
Admiral Jaureguiberry, an officer formerly stationed in Vietnam and now
Minister of the Navy and Colonies, the French cabinet next sent three
thousand men to Tongking to set up a protectorate over Vietnam. The
Chinese government also sent troops to the border where they assisted
the Vietnamese.
Early in 1883 the Chinese government decided that the risk of war was
too great and ordered Li Hung Chang to negotiate a settlement with
France. On 1 1 May he signed an agreement with the French minister,
Fournier, which recognised French interests in Tongking and opened
Kuangsi and Yunnan provinces to French trade. He agreed to withdraw
all Chinese forces from Tongking by the end of June but, fearing the
hostile reaction of the war party at court, he did not make this article of
the agreement public. On 19 May 1883, only a week after the Li-Fournier
convention, Liu Yung-fu, whose force was now organised as the Black
Flag army, defeated the French at Hanoi. The war party in Peking there-
upon forbade Chinese forces to evacuate Tongking. The French reinforced
their troops, forced the Black Flags to retreat and pushed on to the
Chinese frontier, but were again repulsed near Bac Le on 23 June. They
then demanded a large indemnity for the breach of the Li-Foumier
agreement. Under the influence of the war party, stimulated by success,
China refused and declared war on France. On 25 August the king of
Annam, doubtful of Chinese protection, accepted a French protectorate.
During March and April 1884 the French advanced in Tongking,
winning several encounters with Chinese forces, and early in the summer
they began to threaten the Chinese coasts with their fleet. China fought
back. Off Foochow in August the French totally destroyed the obsolete
Chinese squadron. In the same month, however, a French attack with
landing forces against Kedung in Formosa was repulsed ; and although the
French made another descent on Formosa in October, and captured
Tansui and Keelung, they failed to take the capital, Taipei, which resisted
all attacks until the end of the war. In Tongking in the next year they took
Liangshan (Langson) and reached the Chinese frontier in February. But
they were heavily defeated there on 23 March 1885. By 29 March the
Chinese had recaptured Liangshan and all the territory lost in Tongking
during 1884.
Ferry, the French premier, was overthrown as a result of these setbacks.
But China was not successful in preventing France from expanding in her
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neighbourhood. In spite of her successes, Li Hung Chang signed a peace
treaty in April 1885 by which China withdrew from Tongking and recog-
nised the French protectorate over Vietnam (Annam). He did so partly
because of the dangers that would follow if the war with France was
allowed to spread, but mainly because China was simultaneously threatened
by Japanese activity in Korea.
Japan had abandoned her plans for the conquest of Korea but she had
managed in 1876 to conclude with Korea the Treaty of Kanghwa, which
provided for trade and diplomatic relations. The treaty stated that Korea
was independent and opened three ports to trade; it was in fact modelled
upon the treaty concluded by France two years before in connection with
Tongking. But the Chinese Board of Foreign Affairs, which had helped
to persuade Korea to receive the Japanese envoys, did not accept the
denial of Chinese suzerainty over Korea which was implied in the treaty,
and Korea continued to be loyal to China. She even sent some Korean
students to be trained at the arsenal, and a Korean representative took up
permanent residence in Tientsin when the Chinese government shifted
control of Korean affairs from Peking to Li Hung-chang in Tientsin. Li’s
policy was that Korea should enter into treaties with the western powers as
a protection against Russia and Japan; and he felt that ‘Korea’s obser-
vance of the usual ceremonies towards our dynasty is not likely to be
changed by treaties with western powers’. It was Li who persuaded the
Koreans to conclude treaties with the Americans at Chemulpo on 6 May
1882 and with England and Germany soon afterwards.
Against this uneasy background violent feuds between pro-Chinese
conservatives and pro-Japanese radicals divided the Korean governing
class and in July 1882 the conservative faction, led by the Taewongun,
father of the king and former regent, attacked the Japanese legation and
tried to seize control of the capital, Seoul. The Japanese Minister was
forced to flee. Both China and Japan sent troops to restore peace. The
Chinese seized the Taewongun, sent him into exile in China, and restored
order. Chinese officials advised the Koreans in their negotiations with
Inoue Kaoru, the Foreign Minister of Japan, who went to Korea to try to
settle the dispute. The Chinese and Japanese consulted freely between
themselves as well as with the Koreans in the settlement. The Chinese
urged the Koreans to make fewer concessions, but felt satisfied with the
resulting Korean-Japanese agreement. It extended trade and residence
privileges as well as giving an indemnity to Japan, and it arranged that,
while Chinese troops should uphold the moderate conservatives in Korea,
Japanese legation guards should protect the pro-Japanese radicals.
Japan withdrew her troops after gaining the right to use legation guards.
Her policy now aimed at independence for Korea, to prevent China or any
other power from dominating it and thus threatening Japan, not at
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dominating the Koreans directly. Even the aggressive elements in Japan
had Korean independence as their goal. The Japanese liberals gave sup-
port to the most progressive faction in the hope that Korea could follow
Japan’s example and reform and strengthen herself. The recent Chinese
intervention, on the other hand, had represented a stronger policy towards
Korea than China had displayed for hundreds of years; and the forward
party at court in China now wanted openly to grasp control of Korea and
to attack Japan in order to recover the Ryukyus. But Li Hung-chang
preferred to station a commercial agent in Seoul, who would give advice to
the Korean king. He opposed war with Japan on the ground that greater
preparedness was essential. Li’s policy was followed. He was bent on
increasing China’s influence in Korea and keeping Korea free of rival
powers without wars.
During the Sino-French hostilities in 1884 another coup d'etat was
carried out by the progressive Korean faction on 4 and 5 December.
Takezoe, the Japanese Minister, exceeded his instructions and took an
active part in their attempt to seize control. The pro-Chinese officials fled
and the chief minister was killed. The king was forced to seek the aid of
Takezoe and his legation guards. After two days of hesitation the Chinese
engaged the Japanese troops, seized the king, compelled the Japanese to
withdraw and re-established the Chinese faction in control. In the clash
Chinese troops were joined by Chinese-trained Koreans and Japanese
troops by Japanese-trained Koreans.
Japan concluded a relatively mild treaty with Korea in settlement of this
affair, despite the patriotic excitement it had aroused at home; and Japan
did not seek to gain advantage by combining with France against China.
On the contrary, Ito Hirobumi, who exercised a dominating influence on
Japanese policy to the end of the century, went to Tientsin to settle the
dispute over the clash of Chinese and Japanese troops in Seoul. The con-
vention with China, concluded on 18 April 1885, provided for mutual
withdrawal of forces, including legation guards, but both countries kept
the right to send troops back to Korea upon notifying the other. This put
China and Japan on an equal footing from the strategic point of view
although China came to play a more important role politically than she
had previously done. The two outbreaks in Seoul involving Japan, to-
gether with the new threats from the European powers, had enabled Li
Hung-chang to expand China’s influence in the peninsula with Japan’s
acquiescence.
Only three weeks after the Tientsin convention, England, less expan-
sionist than some of the European powers, suddenly occupied Port
Hamilton, a harbour formed by two islands off the Korean coast. The
reason for this was the outbreak of the Penjdeh crisis between Great
Britain and Russia over Afghanistan. As war seemed likely the Admiralty
made up its mind to occupy the port as a naval base. Naval vessels were
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sent there in the first week of April; when a Russian ship visited the
harbour in the second week of May the British flag was hoisted. Tseng
Chi-tse, the Chinese Minister in London, inquired about this occupation
on 8 April. He was informed on 26 April that it was a temporary occupa-
tion to prevent seizure by another power, and the Foreign Office indicated
its readiness to reach agreement with China on the matter. Li Hung-chang
used this as an opportunity to propose an Anglo-Chinese alliance, but
there was little response in England or even in China. The Chinese
government’s proposal that Great Britain should guarantee Korea’s
independence similarly received no support from England. The Japanese
Minister in Peking proposed an international guarantee of Korea by the
powers, but again there was no response in London. An informal entente
of England and China did, however, grow up from this date and they
co-operated against their common rivals, Russia, France, and Japan, until
the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, when England deserted China.
Almost as soon as Port Hamilton was occupied in April 1885, the
Afghanistan tension began to ease between Britain and Russia. At the
same time China’s war with France and her strained relations with Japan
were brought to an end. But tension persisted in the area because of the
growing suspicion by other powers of Russia’s intentions. Russia’s ex-
pansionist interest had shifted toward East Asia ever since the territory
north of Manchuria was taken and Vladivostok founded in i860. Since
the harbour there was closed by ice four months of the year, the Russians
wanted an open harbour suitable as a naval base. Korea had excellent
harbours. Russia had even occupied Tsushima, a Japanese island off the
south coast of Korea, in 1861, until warned away by English naval vessels.
She now brought pressure on China, tempted the Koreans with offers of
aid and threatened to seize a Korean port in retaliation for the British
occupation of Port Hamilton. At the same time she began negotiations
with Li for a joint guarantee of Korea’s independence. But the opportu-
nity for an international guarantee was lost because the Chinese failed to
appreciate its value. The Russians insisted on the status quo in Korea and
an arrangement by which the regime could only be changed by joint
agreement. Li feared the loss of Chinese freedom of action in Korea as a
result of what would have been in effect neutralisation of the peninsula.
The matter was not pursued farther.
England withdrew from Port Hamilton on receiving Russia’s assurance,
at the end of 1886, that she had no territorial ambition in Korea. The
Chinese then intervened more actively in the country to oppose the king’s
attempts to send representatives abroad and to pay off the Korean debts
to other countries. China made loans to replace these and assumed the
control of Korean customs and telegraphs as security. China succeeded
by these means in expanding her political influence in Korea and in
excluding any other rivals. She did so with the acquiescence of Japan : the
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country was under a joint Sino-Japanese protectorate. But the danger of
Russian expansion persisted. Li Hung-chang made great efforts to have
a modern Chinese fighting-force created, but he was dependent on the
resources of his own province, the other provinces being reluctant to
finance the weak and corrupt central government. As a counter to Russian
expansionism England lent him instructors and helped him to start a
modern fleet and to set up a military and naval establishment at Port
Arthur in Manchuria. Li secretly sent an English engineer to investigate
a railway route north to the Russian border in 1890. This was found out
by Russia and the alarm stimulated St Petersburg to carry out the plan
for a trans-Siberian railroad, construction of which began in 1891. The
inevitable increase of Russian power which would result deeply disturbed
the Chinese and Japanese leaders who began to feel that urgent action
might be needed to forestall its consequences.
Japan’s position was by now quite different from China’s as a result of
twenty years of internal progress. To a large extent the programme of
strength through internal development had been successful. Modern legal
codes and courts as well as a parliament were in operation; a modem
education system had been established ; and Japan was able to revise her
treaties with the great powers and to abolish the foreign consular juris-
diction and the fixed tariffs which hampered other oriental countries. In
addition to a navy, a modem conscript army had been created. These
advances created a greater confidence in the military and diplomatic
instruments upon which the Japanese leaders had lavished their efforts for
twenty years. At the same time, parliament and the political parties, who
gave expression to the discontent resulting from the social and economic
consequences of this rapid change, voiced their criticism particularly
against the weak and pacific foreign policy pursued for so long.
The Chinese leaders completely misjudged the situation in Japan when
a new crisis arose over Korea from the demand of the Tonghak party, or
‘party of Eastern learning’, for the end of misgovernment and corrup-
tion. This party was nationalistic, anti-westem and anti-Japanese and it
appealed to Korean conservatism, which hated modem and particularly
western innovations. The Tonghaks seized control in many Korean
provinces and defeated the government troops sent against them. The
Korean king asked for Chinese troops to suppress the rebellion. Li,
dispatching them, thought that the Japanese government was too ab-
sorbed in internal affairs to care much about Korea. Even the Chinese
Minister in Tokyo, noting the fury of the political battles in parliament,
was of the opinion that no action by Japan was to be expected. But anti-
Korean feeling was particularly great in Japan at this time: there had
been Korean attempts to stop rice exports to Japan and a pro-Japanese
progressive Korean, Kim Ok-kyun, had been killed. The situation was
not unlike that of 1873. It is not surprising that the Japanese leaders
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promptly sent troops, as they had done under less tense conditions in 1882
and 1884.
When the Japanese troops reached Korea the Tonghaks dispersed. The
Chinese troops were held at Yashan near the Chinese border to avoid any
clash. With their troops in the field the Japanese leaders were inclined to
force a solution to the troublesome Korean problem after years of in-
conclusive efforts. Li Hung-chang and the Chinese court, dismayed by
the prompt Japanese intervention, requested a simultaneous withdrawal
as the rebellion seemed to be over. The Japanese Prime Minister, Ito
Hirobumi, decided not to withdraw but to insist that the two countries
should join in carrying out internal reforms in Korea. This would have put
Korea under a real condominium and ended the freedom of China to
influence her alone. The Chinese leaders were not prepared to accept. The
forthright Yuan Shih-k’ai, China’s resident in Seoul, asked to have
Chinese troops moved forward and reinforcements sent from China. Li
asked Japan to withdraw, since her recognition of Korean independence
precluded intervention in internal affairs. Li hoped Russia would inter-
vene. Japan went on to occupy Seoul and announced that she would
reform Korea on her own. When she expelled Chinese officials from Seoul
Li asked for reinforcements to be sent to Pyongyang. On 25 July 1894 the
Japanese navy sank a Chinese troop-ship. On 29 July Japanese forces
attacked and routed a concentration of five thousand Chinese troops
stationed on the west coast of Korea. War was declared by Japan on
1 August.
The Chinese reinforced their army in Korea until it numbered 13,000
men, but no more troops were available in the adjoining provinces of
Manchuria and no preparation to bring up larger numbers from China
had been made. In addition the Japanese mastery of the sea, secured by
the defeat of a Chinese squadron off the mouth of the Yalu river on
17 September 1894, made the use of the only rapid means of communica-
tion impossible for the Chinese. Two days before this naval battle the
Japanese army attacked the Chinese forces, which they outnumbered,
before Pyongyang (P’ingjang), the capital of northern Korea, defeated
them and drove them back to the Chinese frontier, the Yalu river. During
October and November the Japanese continued their advance into South
Manchuria, winning a number of engagements. On 21 November they
captured Lushun (Port Arthur), the best harbour on that coast. In
February 1895 the remains of the Chinese fleet were destroyed at
Weihaiwei, and that port captured; in March the conquest of South
Manchuria was completed by a victory at Yingkou, near the Treaty Port
of Newchuang.
Japan tried to mollify Great Britain and Russia by assuring them that
she would seize no Korean territory: only reforms, not Japanese control,
would be undertaken. Britain had first thought that China would win
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easily, but when China’s prompt collapse threatened the balance of power
she proposed a joint intervention to several powers. Germany and the
United States refused although Russia agreed. The British Cabinet then
came to the conclusion that China was too ineffective and that diplomatic
efforts to assist her would be useless. British public opinion also turned
away from China. But while Great Britain was withdrawing her proposals
Russia approached France and Germany in February and March 1895
with proposals for co-operation to secure the independence and integrity
of Korea. Germany hesitated ; fearing that China was about to be parti-
tioned she inquired if England would support her in securing the Chusan
Islands at the mouth of the Yangtse river. But she finally fell in with the
Russian proposals and there developed a triple combination of European
powers that was to prove a great threat both to Japanese and to British
interests.
At the peace negotiations in April 1 895 Japan insisted on the complete
independence of Korea and demanded the cession to herself of Formosa,
the Pescadores Islands and the southern tip of Manchuria containing Port
Arthur. Her continental territorial demands went beyond the policy of
Soejima twenty years before. An indemnity, the opening of new ports,
freedom of navigation on the Yangtse and the right to set up factories in
China were also included in her peace terms. A treaty with these provisions
was signed by Li Hung-chang on 17 April at Shimonoseki in Japan.
Great Britain was satisfied with these terms : the new commercial privi-
leges obtained by Japan would be automatically extended to the other
powers; Japan represented a much better obstacle to Russian ambitions
than did China. At the same time Korea was to be fully independent and
kept out of Russian hands. But Russia, who was too weak to seize
Chinese territory before the Siberian railway was finished, France, who
was Russia’s ally since the negotiation between 1892 and 1894 of the
Franco-Russian convention, and Germany, who feared that the partition
of China would otherwise be attempted without her, joined together in
‘inviting’ Japan to give up South Manchuria. If Japan refused, Russia
was prepared to bombard Japanese ports and thus to pose as saviour of
China.
The Russian, French, and German notes were presented on 23 April.
On 1 May Japan offered to return all but Port Arthur but on 5 May she
capitulated completely by agreeing to return all her conquests on the
continent after the treaty was ratified and if she were given a larger
indemnity. The treaty was ratified at Cheefoo on 8 May under the guns of
the Russian fleet stripped for action.
The three friends of China fell out over the opportunity to lend money
to China for the payment of the Japanese indemnity. Negotiations began
between China and bankers in London and Berlin. France, fearing to be
left out, offered alternative funds, and Russia agreed to back them with a
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government guarantee. China accepted this offer and in an agreement
with Russia on 6 July agreed to furnish additional security in case of
default and undertook to give no foreign power rights to supervise or
administer her revenues without granting similar rights to Russia. Russia
thus gained a privileged position which marked the start of her pre-
ponderance in China. Germany was resentful that her bankers had been
jostled aside from a lucrative loan, but she welcomed Russia’s diversion
from European affairs to the Far East and so made little protest.
Japan retained some of the spoils of her victory. She gained Formosa
and the Pescadores as well as destroying China’s influence in Korea. But
she had failed to expand on to the continent at a time when the great weak-
ness of China, now made clear, combined with the effects of the recent
Franco-Russian Alliance on international alignments to stimulate a
scramble for Chinese wealth and territory by the European powers. The
scramble for China was characterised by the gaining of spheres of influ-
ence — areas in which foreign powers obtained concessions for railways,
mines and telegraphs, secured favoured positions for trade and leased
areas for naval bases or commerce. France was the first to make such
demands. As early as 20 June 1895 she forced upon China a border settle-
ment concerning Tongking. Three new frontier stations were opened to
trade and reductions were made in China’s tariffs. China agreed to apply
first to France for help in exploiting mines in the three neighbouring
provinces. Later an agreement was made by which French railways and
telegraphs would be extended into China.
Great Britain, who possessed the bulk of the trade and influence in
south China, was the power most threatened by the French move, but was
also well placed to counter it. As soon as it was made she negotiated a
separate arrangement with France by which the two powers agreed to
share any privileges gained in the southern provinces of China. In
February 1896 she obtained China’s agreement to her proposals regarding
the border between China and Burma. She also gained the right to extend
a railway into China from there. This was in compensation for the
Chinese concession to France. France then demanded compensation for
the English compensation; in June 1897 she received the right to extend
her Chinese railway and priority to exploit mines in the southern provinces.
Her demands were accompanied by threats to stop payment on the
Japanese indemnity loan to China.
On 6 April 1896 a most important demand came from Russia for rail-
way rights in north Manchuria. She wanted a more direct line for the
trans-Siberian railway. Since this was a line the Chinese preferred to build
themselves, Li Hung-chang was offered an alliance when he went to
St Petersburg for the tsar’s coronation. A secret defensive alliance against
Japan covering Korea and other territories was signed on 3 June 1896, in
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return for which China agreed that the railway should be built by a Russo-
Chinese Bank on an eighty-year lease, though reserving the right to buy it
back after thirty-six years. A so-called private company, the Chinese
Eastern Railway, was organised by the Russo-Chinese Bank and the
Chinese government. It was provided with some Chinese officers, but
these had little influence: the bank’s shares were all owned by the Russian
government and the organisation was used by Russia to develop Russian
control in the north.
Japan, dissatisfied with the situation in Korea, also decided to reach
agreement with Russia. She offered to divide Korea at the thirty-eighth
parallel into Russian and Japanese spheres. An agreement — the Yama-
gata-Lobanov agreement — reached on 9 June 1896 established what was
really a joint protectorate. Neither Russia nor Japan yet felt strong
enough to antagonise the other over Korea. They pledged joint support to
the Korean king to enable him to establish order, build up his military and
police and prevent financial collapse. They renounced separate action in
Korea and agreed on arrangements for sending troops into the country, if
this became necessary. The two powers were thus temporarily assured that
neither would seize territory in Korea, although Japan was free to con-
tinue the commercial penetration of that area as Russia had become free
to develop the area farther north.
China and Korea were protected from Japan, but there was no one to
protect China against Russia, France or England, whose commercial and
industrial penetration in separate spheres in north, south and centre was
already proceeding, or against Germany, whose demands now began the
second stage of the scramble. The German emperor was eager to gain a
naval and commercial base since his country was dependent in the Far
East upon British Hong Kong for coal and supplies. In August 1897, after
careful consideration, the German emperor personally discussed with the
tsar the leasing by Germany of the port of Kiao-chow in Shantung. On
1 November two German missionaries were killed by bandits in Shantung.
A German squadron was sent to Kiao-chow to occupy it and threaten
reprisals. The emperor declared that he was ‘firmly determined to give up
our over-cautious policy which is regarded as weak throughout eastern
Asia, and to demonstrate through the use of sternness, and if necessary
of the most brutal ruthlessness towards the Chinese, that the German
emperor cannot be trifled with’.
The Russians protested strongly against the German move. Great
Britain, on the other hand, to whom Germany was ready to make con-
cessions in return for support, was not only not opposed to the step, but was
pleased to see the Germans and Russians competing in the north of China
away from the British sphere. The Russians backed the Chinese in resisting
the German demands, but at the end of the year abandoned them in order
to pursue a different plan. By March 1898 Germany had received a
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ninety-nine-year lease of Kiao-chow Bay, where she soon built the major
military and naval base of Tsingtau. Extensive if ill-defined rights to
build railways and develop mines in the whole province made Shantung in
all but name a German protectorate.
When the Germans had shown themselves determined not to give way
over Kiao-chow, Russian fleet orders for opposition to this occupation
had been withdrawn. Russia’s alternative policy was to demand an ice-
free port in north China for herself. She hesitated before doing so both
from fear of precipitating the partition of China and because of the risk of
British and Japanese opposition. Britain and Japan opposed any control
by Russia of a Korean port for fear it would give her naval predominance
in East Asia. A squadron of nine English cruisers and some Japanese ships
was now sent to Korea to emphasise their opposition to any moves in that
direction. The Japanese also began a naval expansion programme which
was to be completed in 1904 and which the Russian minister in Tokyo
reported to be aimed at war with Russia. These dangers led to divisions in
the Russian government. The Russian Foreign Minister, Count Michael
Muraviev, urged the taking of Port Arthur on the tip of Manchuria from
which the Japanese had been driven only two years before; all the other
Russian ministers were opposed. The Finance Minister, Witte, thought it
unnecessary to take anything when China was on such excellent terms
with Russia. On the contrary, he still thought the Germans should be
ejected from Kiao-chow. Nevertheless, Muraviev managed to win over
the tsar, who told the German emperor on 14 December 1897 that on the
invitation of the Chinese a Russian squadron would anchor ‘temporarily’
at Port Arthur, and who expressed the hope that Russia and Germany
would work together in the Far East. This decision marked the abandon-
ment of the Russian policy of protecting Chinese territory in favour of
participation in the scramble for territorial partition.
When China approached Russia for a loan to finance the third instal-
ment of the Japanese indemnity, she was asked to lease Russia a harbour
on the Yellow Sea with connections to the Siberian railway. Russia
demanded, in other words, a port and connections to the Manchurian
coast, the very territory which she had forced Japan to relinquish. China
tried to evade the pressure by turning to Britain for finances. In return for
her support Britain asked for rights which would enable her to counter
France in south China and to safeguard the British sphere in central
China. As the lesser of two evils the loan was awarded to the British
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation with some concessions to
Britain.
The British government, alarmed by the threat of Russian penetration
in the north, hoped to off-set it by co-operation, and opened talks with
Russia. In order to keep open her access to the trade and industrial
development of the whole of China, it wanted a guarantee of equal com-
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mercial opportunity in any new Russian sphere. Russia refused to give
adequate reassurances on this point and in addition, on 3 March 1898,
caused a crisis in Anglo-Russian relations by demanding Port Arthur,
Talien, and railway rights from China. England approached the United
States, Germany and Japan with the suggestion for a joint protest against
the lease of Port Arthur. On 17 March she suggested joint action to the
Japanese minister in London. Kato Takaaki recommended an alliance
to his own government. This was rejected, and Kato resigned in protest,
because the Japanese Prime Minister, like the British, preferred, if possible,
to reach agreement with Russia. On 25 April the Nishi-Rosen agreement
was signed by Japan and Russia which reaffirmed that both powers would
abstain politically and militarily in Korea, and that Japan would have a
free hand economically. By making slight concessions to Japan’s interest
in Korea, Russia was gaining Japanese acquiescence with her penetration
in Manchuria. Japan for her part did not like to see any extension of
Russian influence, but the Prime Minister thought that war with Russia
was inevitable in due course and that this accommodation would serve
until military preparations were complete and German and French sup-
port of Russia less likely.
England had sent warships to Port Arthur in January at the time of the
Russian occupation, and the occupation caused a strong outcry against
Russia in England. For some weeks a clash seemed possible. But when it
was reported that Li Hung-chang and the other negotiators were yielding
— on 27 March China agreed to a lease of Port Arthur to Russia — the
British government decided that a war over Port Arthur was not justified,
especially since the German and American governments had proved as
reluctant as Japan to collaborate. Instead it decided to ask for a lease of
Weihaiwei, a port in Shantung opposite Port Arthur. The Japanese had
occupied it since the war of 1894, but were w illin g to hand it over to
Britain, who assured both Japan and Germany that it would not be used
against them. In the end, her reaction to the Russian move had been the
same as Russia’s to Germany’s. Nor were other powers willing to be
excluded. France demanded a coaling station; insisted upon a guarantee
that China would not cede provinces in the French sphere of south China
to any other country; and asked for further railway construction rights.
These demands were granted and France took Kuangchow Bay in the
south on 22 April 1898. In 1899 the Italians demanded Sanmen Bay in
Chekiang. But by then the Chinese temper had changed. The Italian
demand was rejected. Italy threatened war and recalled her minister. But
China stood firm and nothing more was heard of Sanmen.
The rivalry of Russia, Britain, France and Germany in China was
inspired by fears of the advantages that might be gained by competitors in
the exploitation of the country. The spirit animating the powers was well
expressed by Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, when he said in
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his ‘Dying Nations Speech’ at the Albert Hall on 4 May 1898, ‘The living
nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seed
and causes of conflict amongst civilised nations will speedily appear. Of
course, it is not to be supposed that any one nation of the living nations
will be allowed to have the profitable monopoly of curing or cutting up
these unfortunate patients, and the controversy is as to who shall have the
privilege of doing so, and in what measure he shall do it.’
As a result of the war with Spain in 1898 the United States government,
too, began to show increased support for expansion in the Far East.
American settlers had pressed for the annexation of Hawaii for years;
now, on account of the war with Spain and because growing Japanese
emigration made it possible that Hawaii might be lost as a naval base, it
was annexed on 6 July 1898.
The Americans defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May 1898,
and the defeat of Spain brought up the question of the future of her
colonies. Germany hoped to obtain them. England, opposed as usual to
German expansion, urged the United States to take the Philippines for
herself. Her arguments were assisted by the dispatch of a German
squadron to Manila, for this led to bad feelings between Germany and the
United States. The German government had hoped at first for a German
protectorate and then for the neutralisation or partition of the Philippines.
The violently hostile American reaction to the presence of German ships
confirmed the United States in her decision to obtain the Philippine
Islands herself, and overcame her earlier hesitation. The final decision to
demand all the islands reversed the earlier decision to ask for Luzon only.
The islands, besides giving a good strategic position in the Pacific, would
also give the United States a territorial base near to China and its valuable
trade. The European powers already had such bases and it was clear that
they and Japan would scramble for any such area that was not firmly held.
These were the arguments underlying the American decision. For similar
reasons the United States also had her title to the island of Guam con-
firmed by Spain.
Germany did not go entirely empty-handed. By secret agreements with
Spain in September and December 1898 she was able to purchase the
Caroline, Mariana and Pelew Islands, tiny and unproductive islands
which were to provide naval and coaling stations. But she was severely
disappointed about the outcome in the Philippines, as also by the out-
come of an agreement she had reached with Great Britain concerning
Portugal’s colonies in Africa. She was accordingly the more determined
to gain territory when the Samoan problem came up again. The much
deposed and restored Samoan king died in 1898, and civil war was
resumed. The American Chief Justice of Samoa fled to a British warship
when his choice of the king’s successor put him in jeopardy. A British ship
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landed marines to support the American protege early in 1899. When an
American admiral arrived in Samoa in March of 1899, his intervention in
local politics caused new outbreaks. American and British ships damaged
the German consulate in the course of the disturbances. Incensed by these
events Germany pressed with increasing determination proposals which
she had made in August 1898 for the partition of the Samoan islands.
These would have given two islands to the United States, two to Germany,
and Tonga to the British. Great Britain had rejected them, urging the
objections of both New Zealand and Australia. In May 1 899, however,
under German pressure and against a background of worsening Anglo-
German relations, she agreed that the three protecting powers should send
commissioners to Samoa. Subsequently, partly because of her growing
difficulties with the Boer Republic, England became disposed to settle the
Samoan issue in a manner satisfactory to Germany — though Australia
and New Zealand remained opposed to German expansion, which made it
difficult for Britain to strike a bargain, and Germany still felt bitter at
having had to struggle for the place where her first colonisation had
occurred and where her interests were very large. Final agreement was
reached on 1 November 1899. Germany received Upolu, the principal
island, and Savaii. Britain received Tonga and Savage, the lesser Solomons
and a disputed area in Togoland in Africa. The United States received the
two islands in which she was interested in Samoa.
In China, despite the government’s resistance to the Italian demands,
the struggle for further foreign rights continued. A Franco-Belgian syndi-
cate backed by the Russo-Chinese Bank obtained railway rights in the
British sphere in central China and a British bank obtained railway rights
in Manchuria. In compensation for the financial invasion of central
China by Russian interests, Britain, by threats and naval demonstrations,
also obtained other railway construction rights from China. But in 1899
the growing clash between their interests led Great Britain and Russia to
sign an agreement to respect each other’s spheres and not to support the
entry of other powers into them. Russia did not come to the point of
promising equal commercial opportunity to all comers in her sphere, as
Britain had hoped and as she was willing to grant in her own area.
American business interests had received some of the concessions for
railways in China. But they had been unable to take advantage of them,
largely because of American reluctance to invest funds in China, and the
United States government had not so far concerned itself directly with
events in China. It was thus a new departure of some importance when,
in September 1899, Hay, the American Secretary of State, asked England,
Germany and Russia to promise equal treatment to foreign commerce in
their spheres in China with regard to duties, railway charges, and harbour
dues. This suggestion was in line with the British policy of preserving ‘ the
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open door’ for trade and was particularly aimed at Russia; the American
government was beginning to be afraid that American commercial inter-
ests would be excluded or discriminated against in Manchuria. Great
Britain had previously suggested, in vain, that Russia and the United
States should support such a policy. Japan, Italy and France were also
asked by Hay to subscribe to the principle of equal treatment in Novem-
ber. All the governments addressed fell in with Hay’s proposal, but Russia
in fact so qualified her reply as to avoid agreeing to the principle of equal
commercial treatment. The immediate effect of the American attempt to
neutralise China was small, although it was later to be supported by the
major powers. Hay’s action indicated that the competition in China had
reached serious proportions; but his attempt to find some co-operative
method of halting the absorption of the country was premature.
China, meanwhile, was looking to Japan as a model in her effort to save
herself from European aggression. She sent many students to study there,
and while Japanese influence grew in Peking, that of Russia faded for the
moment. But the expansionists in Russia were still busy. They wished to
attain a good position in Korea where they would not be blocked, as they
would by the British near Port Arthur, and where they could command
the approach to Japan and north China. In 1898 a group of diplomats,
bankers and business interests in Russia had formed the Eastern Asiatic
Company with a dramatic plan to smuggle twenty thousand troops into
Korea as woodsmen under a timber concession. The tsar gave his
approval but the plan was blocked by Count Witte, the Finance Minister,
who objected to the necessary loan. The Russian naval authorities then
sought a base at Masampo on the southern tip of Korea. Despite the
threats of Russia, the Koreans, backed by Japan, refused the request in the
autumn of 1899. On 16 March 1900 a Russian squadron anchored near
the capital of Korea and induced the king to permit a coal depot and
naval hospital to be set up at Masampo. This created tension with both
England and Japan, but neither Japan nor Russia was ready to fight at
this time. Japan decided not to challenge Russia when she learned that
the lease for Masampo was very restricted in nature.
In the summer of 1900, after the outbreak of the Boxer rebellion in
China, although the Russian government had decided not to seize Man-
churia and north China, it occupied Manchuria when Russia’s small forces
there were attacked by the Chinese. The less expansionist of the Russian
leaders favoured taking no action to rescue the Peking legations. Eventu-
ally, however, a small force was sent, and other elements in the Russian
government hoped to use it to gain control over the area near Peking. As
soon as the legations had been relieved, Russia proposed that the joint
expeditionary force which the powers had sent to Peking should be with-
drawn immediately. Some Russians, including Witte, urged this general
withdrawal from Peking in the hope of preventing a general partition of
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China. Others supported the proposal because the presence of an inter-
national force would hamper their plans in the Peking area. Others hoped
at least to use it as a means of gaining at least the goodwill of the Chinese
in a settlement. England and Germany were dismayed by the suggestion:
it appeared to them to be aimed at persuading the Chinese to present
Russia with Manchuria in return for her having rid Peking of foreigners.
England and Germany also feared partition. They concluded an agree-
ment on 1 6 October 1900 by which they would uphold throughout China,
‘in so far as they could exert influence’, equality of opportunity for all in
trade, and by which they would themselves seek no territorial acquisitions.
Great Britain hoped that this had assured her of German support against
Russia, but Germany, who had, indeed, refused to commit herself
regarding Manchuria in the negotiation of the agreement, told Russia that
the agreement did not extend to Manchuria, where the Russian govern-
ment was free to do as it wished. Germany was chiefly anxious to prevent
Great Britain from using the crisis to increase her hold on the Yangtse
valley, and had signed the agreement for that purpose.
Russia was already negotiating with China to obtain a stronger position
in Manchuria and other regions of China adjacent to Russia. A draft
agreement was given to the Chinese Minister in St Petersburg on 8 Febru-
ary 1901. It provided for the resumption of Chinese civil administration,
but permitted the retention of Russian troops and gave new railway
rights and indemnification for various Russian expenses. Even before it
was presented to China the Japanese Foreign Minister asked Britain to
join Japan in a protest to Russia against it. He met with no success. In
February he suggested that Great Britain and Japan should jointly warn
China against signing the agreement. Britain was afraid to ignore the
Japanese proposals lest Japan finally accept an agreement with Russia for
the partition of China, but she was also reluctant to be committed against
Russia. Accordingly she tried to enlist German co-operation with herself
and Japan against Russia. The Germans joined Great Britain and Japan
in sending notes to Peking, but they would go no farther. The Russians,
ignoring this step, pressed the Chinese to sign at the end of February.
Japan hesitated to attack Russia, who might be supported by the French
fleet. She therefore sought English support again, asking if England would
hold France in check in the event of a Russo-Japanese War.
Germany hoped that England would accept this commitment to Japan
and thus become so involved in difficulties with France and Russia that
she would need an alliance with Germany. She had for some years been
aiming at such an alliance on her own terms, which would include the
demand for a larger share of the overseas possessions monopolised so
exasperatingly by England. Approached again by Great Britain and
Japan, she promised to be neutral if war broke out in East Asia, but
refused to support Britain in demanding equal opportunity to trade — the
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‘open door’ — in Manchuria. This caused strong resentment in England
since Germany had seemed to join with her a year before in affirming an
interest in maintaining the ‘ open door ’ in China. Deterred by the German
attitude, the British government continued to hold back. The Japanese
alone on 6 April sent a strong protest to Russia. The Russians reduced
their demands on China, permitting some Chinese troops in Manchuria
in return for a larger indemnity and dropping the request for a special
sphere in other areas. Li Hung-chang was inclined to yield but, in the face
of protests by other viceroys, the Chinese Board of Foreign Affairs
appealed again to the foreign powers for aid. England and Japan again
warned China not to sign an agreement with Russia. At this Russia with-
drew her demands and insisted that she had never made any demands,
only suggestions for temporary arrangements.
The Manchurian crisis was temporarily over, but since Russia remained
in occupation of Manchuria the problem persisted for the other powers.
This was the setting for the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
This project was again discussed between Great Britain and Japan in
London in July 1901, but serious negotiations did not begin until October
and even then there was further delay. England desired to include India
within the scope of an agreement, but Japan insisted that it could only
apply to ‘the extreme east’. Another difficulty was that, while Great
Britain needed an assurance that she would not be dragged into a Russo-
Japanese dispute in which her own interests were not directly involved,
Japan wanted to be sure of British support for her ambitions in Korea.
Each side remained hesitant, moreover, as to whether it would not be
better to reach agreement with Russia than with each other. Eventually,
however, they reached agreement. The proposal which finally resulted was
for a joint guarantee of the independence and integrity of China and
Korea and of equal opportunities there for the commerce and trade of all
countries; and it was so phrased that Japan was given a free hand in
Korea without, on the other hand, receiving undue encouragement there.
In addition each party promised to remain neutral if the other was
involved in war with a third party and to go to the other’s aid if another
power sided against her in the conflict.
The principal value of the agreement to Britain was that it precluded
any Japanese-Russian co-operation to partition China to the detriment
of British interests. The agreement also had the effect of protecting China.
On Japan’s part the agreement safeguarded her special interest in Korea.
Her main concern was that Russia should not be allowed into Korea,
whence she could dominate East Asia and threaten Japan. She had even
been willing to concede a free hand to Russia in Manchuria and adjacent
parts of China provided she was allowed to dominate Korea. Russo-
Japanese discussions had fallen through because Russia had not been
willing to go so far. Once the Siberian railway was finished, Russia
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intended to take Korea whether Japan opposed her or not. But with the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance Japan felt confident that she could deal with any
Russian move.
Both Russia and France were disagreeably surprised to learn of the new
alliance. The effect on Russia was immediate. She announced that she
was ready to withdraw from Manchuria, but asked China for a separate
agreement with and special concessions to the Russo-Chinese Bank. On
1 1 February the Chinese, strengthened by a protest from the United States,
as well as by the news of the new alliance, rejected the bank agreement.
On 13 February in the British parliament the government stated that
Manchuria was not excluded from the new alliance’s scope. Although
Japan and Britain did not intend to get involved in a war over Manchuria,
this was technically correct, and the Russians must have been impressed.
On 8 April they finally withdrew from Manchuria with nothing to show
for all their efforts.
The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, by thus bringing the Manchurian crisis
to an end, also brought to a halt, if only temporarily, that process in
which, especially since 1894, the European governments as well as Japan
and the U.S.A. had engaged in increasingly fierce competition in the
Far East.
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THE UNITED STATES AND
THE OLD WORLD
B y the time of the Civil War the first American expansive drive was
over. The most obvious objectives of manifest destiny had been
achieved, and the frontiers of the United States were logically satis-
fying. The country stretched from sea to sea. To the north lay Canada, a
region which, it could be argued, must some day inevitably fall to the
United States, but whose accession it was neither necessary nor desirable
to hasten. To the south lay Mexico, arid and uninviting, and peopled by
men whose stock, language, religion and traditions were suspect to most
Americans.
Within the United States itself there was ample land to occupy the
energies of a vigorous people. Even before the Civil War manifest destiny
and the lure of the West had not been the only impulse to expansion.
Competition between North and South for the control of the West, as a
source of both economic and political strength, had been as important in
determining the urgency of the rush to the Pacific. The genuine expan-
sionists had hoped to divert Americans from their sectional quarrel by
invoking the imperial dream ; but their failure to do so did not slow an
advance which the quarrel itself turned into a race. When the Civil War
was won and lost, the most obvious goal of expansion had been achieved
and the most impelling motive of expansion removed.
If there was nothing in American domestic politics to cause an interest
in foreign affairs, there was equally nothing in the outside world to
require it. In the thirty years after 1870 it was the affairs of Europe that
commanded the attention of the European powers. They were years in
which great areas were added to European empires, but it is by now a
familiar paradox that empires grow at a rate inversely proportional to the
attention they receive. When competition is keen the publicity is enormous
and the gains small. Empire-builders flourish in the shadows of indiffer-
ence. It was already well established that the western hemisphere was
no area for colonisation. Apart from the hostility of the United States,
the political structure of Latin America was sufficiently advanced to make
imperialism there a matter calling for the expenditure of considerable
national resources. It would have required government intervention, and
that their European preoccupations prevented the governments of Europe
from considering. After the abortive French intervention in Mexico,
whose abrupt end was dictated by European commitments rather than by
American opposition, the United States did not face even the mildest
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challenge to the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. This, originally enun-
ciated by President Monroe in 1823, made two main points — that the
western hemisphere was not to be regarded as an area for colonisation by
European powers, and that European intervention in the Americas would
be treated as an unfriendly act by the United States — as well as asserting
that the United States did not intend to take any part in European affairs.
The characteristic attitude was that of Russia, which was not only willing
but eager to get rid of Alaska, and sold it to the United States in 1867 for
the derisory sum of seven million dollars. American enthusiasm for the
purchase was distinctly less than Russian for the sale. * Seward’s icebox ’ —
named after W. H. Seward, Secretary of State under Andrew Johnson,
who negotiated the purchase — was widely regarded as a poor buy. True
to the imperial pattern, the Americans made their largest acquisition in
indifference.
The United States then settled into a period in which the development
of the country absorbed the energy of its people, and foreign affairs got
little attention. The victory of the North, and the political dominance
which victory brought, gave the country unity, superficial at first but
nevertheless effective, greater than it had had for years. The growing
strength of the United States — and these were years of prodigious
growth — made confidence increasingly plausible at a time when the
attention of the powers was concentrated on Europe and that of Americans
on their own continent. But it was essential to American confidence that
Americans did not notice the conditions which made it possible. Their
ideas of the outside world were based on experience in the Americas ; and
within the Americas they had long achieved the position of members of
the leading state. It was their good fortune to be able to develop their
policies and their political myths within the limits of the western hemi-
sphere.
The necessary conditions were the existence in Europe of a group of
large powers of roughly equivalent strength. Potentially, if not in actual
military force, the United States could already rank as one of the powers;
but her geographical position would have made her less effective in
Europe then her peers. While the alignments of the powers there were still
flexible, it was unnecessary for any group to try to involve her in Europe,
and unwise for all to challenge her elsewhere.
The United States was not, during these years, without contact with the
European powers. But the first signs of American expansion were towards
the west — in the Pacific. There had never been in the American mind the
same antipathy towards contact with the Far East that the ‘corruption’
of Europe had on occasion inspired. Expansion had always meant
expansion to the west; and one powerful element in the myth of manifest
destiny had been the idea that the United States, linking East and West,
was ideally situated to be the centre of their trade. As early as 1844 the
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United States had a trade treaty with China. In 1853 it was the American
Perry who opened Japan to the trade of the West. But for long, even in the
Far East, the United States shared the belief also held in Britain — that
trade was a matter apart from government intervention. For Secretary
Seward the purchase of Alaska was part of a larger design. The indifference
to his purchase was an indication of how little the design was understood.
The first American imperial enterprises could not but increase American
confidence. The domination, and finally in 1898 the annexation, of
Hawaii was achieved without intervention from Europe; in Samoa,
though European powers were directly interested, the prize was relatively
small and the competition relatively mild (ch. xxm). Elsewhere the
United States hardly came into direct competition with Europe before the
1890’s. Meanwhile, however, relations with South America were be-
coming closer. James G. Blaine, Secretary of State under President
Garfield in 1881, and again under Harrison from 1889 to 1892, was the
leading advocate of what came to be called pan-Americanism. Though
himself a strong protectionist, Blaine saw that protection was damaging
American influence in South America. The countries of South America
were still essentially producers of raw materials, and they sold the bulk of
their crops — coffee, sugar, hides, wool and others — to the United States.
They found it cheaper, however, to buy their manufactured goods in
Europe. The pattern of trade was being distorted, and as European trade
with Latin America increased, so, Blaine feared, would European influ-
ence. His proposed remedy was an American customs union, under
which United States goods would enjoy preference in Latin American
countries in exchange for reciprocal preference. As part of his design
Blaine hoped to arrange arbitration treaties to cover disputes in Latin
America, and pan-American conferences to foster close relations among
American countries. Blaine had no opportunity to put his plan into effect
during Garfield’s short presidency; when, returned to office under
Harrison, he called the first International American Conference in 1889,
his proposals for a customs union and for arbitration were both rejected.
The Latin Americans were suspicious of domination from the north, and,
since most of their goods already entered the United States duty free, it
seemed to them that Blaine’s objects were political, not economic. On
the American side the businessmen who dominated Blaine’s own party
were equally suspicious of treaties which might limit American tariffs.
Yet his setback was more apparent than real; though the conference
would not commit itself to arbitration. President Hayes had already
arbitrated a boundary dispute between the Argentine and Paraguay, and
Cleveland later arbitrated another between the Argentine and Brazil.
Blaine was too busy too early; overestimating the European challenge,
he tried to force an American influence in South America which was
inevitably growing.
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These were, in short, the years of business diplomacy, when it was still
possible to claim that the United States had no interests outside her own
shores except the maintenance of standards of international conduct such
as would make the world both safe and profitable for her citizens. This
may appear a simple premise, which should have made the conduct of
consistent policy an easy matter; but, no less than other bases for foreign
policy, it had limitations. With so few genuinely national interests that
could be described as vital, or even defined, American policy was more
than usually open to local or temporary pressures. There was no major
rift within the country to dominate politics, and the way was open for a
whole series of accommodations among politicians which governments,
in the absence of stronger counter-pressures, found it difficult to resist.
Not every motive in American foreign policy was merely selfish or paro-
chial; there was plenty of idealism, and the defenders of local interests
were not, usually, acting improperly. But the interplay of elements so
equally balanced and so liable to temporary unbalance made American
policy more variable than that of other countries.
It was not until the i890’s that Americans began to pay much attention
to the imperatives of international policy. When they did, it was for two
main reasons. First, the steady growth of the United States in population
and industrial potential since the Civil War made her now a formidable
power. The increasing recognition which the powers of Europe gave to
that fact in their calculations brought its implications to the attention of
Americans also. It became more difficult to assume the continuance of
isolation when others were debating its limitations. Second, at the end
of the nineteenth century, when the rivalries of the European powers took
their classic imperialist form, when competition in China, Africa and the
Pacific caught and held public attention, the United States could not
remain unaffected by ideas which were influential in western Europe.
There, Machtpolitik got new support from the work of Darwinian socio-
logists, who argued that nations and races, like species in nature, com-
peted to survive, and that the survival of the fittest was a moral process.
Strength was not merely necessary for security, but necessary as evidence
of the right to survive. This belief was widely shared in the United States,
as were the ambitions it fostered. Nevertheless, American policy re-
mained distinctive. Influential though the new ideas were, their effect was
modified by the history, the political traditions and the geographical
situation of the United States. Imperialism fought a running battle with
older ideas ; American policy charted the struggle.
It was the Spanish-American War, usually and rightly regarded as a
landmark, which brought American policy forcibly to the notice of the
world and of Americans themselves. But there were earlier indications of
change. The first of the controversies which enlarged American thinking
was the Venezuela boundary crisis of 1895. The boundary between
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Venezuela and British Guiana had never been adequately surveyed and
had long been in dispute. There was a long history of diplomatic ex-
changes on the subject between Great Britain and Venezuela, and at
various times the United States had been used as an intermediary. There
had also been earlier independent American expressions of interest, but
these had not gone beyond general statements of desire to see the dispute
settled, and of readiness to do anything that might help to settle it. The
Venezuelans hoped for more. They frequently urged on the United States
the merits of supporting a small South American country against a large
European one. Their aim, or one of their aims, was American interven-
tion. In 1895 they achieved it. President Cleveland and Richard Olney,
his Secretary of State, determined to see the matter settled, if necessary by
the direct action of the United States.
The new policy was set out in Olney’s instruction to the United States
ambassador in London, dated 20 July 1895. It asserted the right of the
United States to intervene, and invoked in support of that right the
Monroe Doctrine. British activity in South America would be contra-
vening that doctrine, if it could be shown that Britain was extending her
territory at the expense and against the opposition of Venezuela. From
this it followed, said Olney, that it was the right and duty of the United
States to determine the facts and so to judge whether the Monroe Doc-
trine were relevant or not. Lord Salisbury, then both Prime Minister and
Foreign Secretary, took more than four months to reply. In two coolly
superior dispatches dated 26 November he denied the right of the United
States to intervene, he pointed out that the Monroe Doctrine was a
principle of American policy, not a rule of international law, and he held
that in any event Olney had extended it to cover matters to which it had
no relevance.
The dispute became public in December when, in response to Salisbury’s
dispatches, Cleveland sent a special message to Congress. In it he claimed
that the American government had made repeated efforts to persuade
Great Britain and Venezuela to agree, that these efforts had failed through
the obduracy of Great Britain, and that it was now time for the United
States to determine the correct boundary and impose that line on the
disputants, if need be by force. As a start he proposed to appoint an
American investigating commission, and he asked Congress to appro-
priate the necessary funds.
American opinion strongly endorsed Cleveland’s action. British
opinion was indignant, but above all surprised. As James Bryce wrote to
Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Not one man out of ten in the House of Commons
even knew there was such a thing as a Venezuelan question pending’.
The rest of the story is that of the negotiation by which Britain ultimately
came to accept American intervention, and not only intervention but
replacement of Venezuela as the other party to the dispute. Salisbury
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abandoned his objection to arbitration of the boundary, obtaining in
return only the small concession that occupation or political control of
any area for fifty years should establish title to it. The arbitration tri-
bunal consisted of two members from each side and a neutral jurist- — a
Russian. Two Americans sat on the tribunal, and no Venezuelan. The
tribunal substantially accepted the British case.
Though Cleveland had been careful to say that in the first instance he
was only setting up a commission to investigate the facts, without pre-
judice to the merits of the case, it was apparent to many observers on both
sides that he only acted at all because he thought that Great Britain was in
the wrong. Only that assumption would have made the Monroe Doctrine
relevant. Whether rightly or wrongly used, it was not intended to protect
European colonies against the encroachment of South American republics.
American intervention, then, was not impartial; but apart from any bias
which the mere fact of intervention implied, the United States had greatly
enlarged the number of disputes in which, if this precedent were followed,
she could intervene. From now on any dispute could be regarded as
coming within the scope of the Monroe Doctrine, provided only that it
involved an American and a European power. For a time the precedent
seemed likely to become established. When American policy changed in
this respect it did so primarily because of the growing resentment among
smaller American republics of this supervision from the north.
President Cleveland was a man of courage and honesty, and one hostile
to imperialism. He was one of the last opponents of expansion. He
prevented while he could the annexation of Hawaii, and he opposed
foreign adventures, naval building and competition with rival powers. It
is therefore the more surprising that he should have enlarged the scope of
the Monroe Doctrine. Probably he did not realise the full implications of
what he was doing; he shared with Olney the belief that Britain was
inclined to treat American interests lightly, and was therefore determined
to defend them vigorously; nevertheless his action reveals the strong moral
element in American imperialism. It was modified, of course, by other
elements; it was not always as strong in others as it was in Cleveland; but
it was important, and it largely accounts for the violence with which
American policy was often expressed. Cleveland and Olney thought that
they were righting a wrong. If the verdict of the arbitration commission
is to be accepted, they were not, but they thought they were and they
spoke with the vigour of that conviction.
At the time of the Venezuela boundary dispute there was a good deal of
hostility between the United States and Canada — fed by subjects as
diverse as Fenianism and fishing rights. In 1897, when President McKinley
succeeded Cleveland, a long-drawn-out dispute began between the two
countries over the boundary between Alaska and Canada, which was not
finally settled till 1903. The boundary had been defined by an Anglo-
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Russian Treaty of 1825. In 1867, when Russia sold Alaska to the United
States, the Americans succeeded to all Russian rights under that treaty.
The definition of the boundary, however, was one thing; the surveying
of it quite another. In practice the definition proved inadequate. The
exact location of the boundary was not of any importance until gold was
found in the border region at the end of the century, but miners of both
nationalities then began to invade the area and there was hope of more
permanent development. That made it desirable to mark the boundary
accurately. A narrow coastal strip deeply indented by inlets extends south-
wards from the main body of Alaska. The most important point at issue
was whether the boundary properly ran across these inlets. This would
have given Canada access to the sea at the head of the inlets, and ports of
her own convenient to the goldfields, and would have reduced American
territory to isolated headlands. The Canadians argued that this was the
proper interpretation of the treaty, the Americans that the Canadian
claim had never been raised before 1890 and was indefensible.
There were two possible ways of approaching the problem. Either it
could be treated as a political dispute, and therefore open to compromise,
or it could be treated as a strictly legal one. The Canadians — represented,
of course, by the British government — tried both ways. When the prob-
lem first arose a joint commission, on which both Canada and Newfound-
land were represented, was already examining certain minor but vexatious
issues in dispute between the two countries. The settlement of the Alaskan
boundary was referred to that commission, but without success. Ironic-
ally, in view of the later history of the dispute, the Americans complained
that Lord Herschell, the chief British commissioner, was too insistent on
the letter of his case and not ready enough to compromise. At the same
time, as will be seen, the two countries were negotiating the terms of the
building and control of an isthmian canal. The Canadians tried to connect
that question with the Alaska boundary, with equal lack of success. The
Americans maintained that the Alaska boundary had no relation with
other questions and should be settled as a matter apart. That was un-
doubtedly sound policy. Americans were settling the disputed region
faster than Canadians, and Canada did not in fact have access to the sea.
Time was on the American side. A modus vivendi was reached in October
1899. Once that had removed the risk of trouble on the frontier, John
Hay, now Secretary of State, was quite willing to postpone a permanent
settlement.
Accordingly the Canadians had to concede the major American point,
that this was a legal dispute, which should be settled by a judicial tribunal
and not by negotiation. The appointment of the tribunal, however,
proved very difficult. The Venezuela boundary had been settled by a
tribunal of five, two from each side and one neutral. Yet in 1897 Britain
and the United States had signed a general arbitration treaty providing
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that each country should find three out of six arbiters, five of whom must
agree for a decision. The treaty had narrowly failed to pass the Senate,
but after long negotiation this was the form of tribunal agreed in January
1903, without the five-sixths majority rule. It is a measure of how time
had been working against Canada that by then Sir Wilfred Laurier, the
Canadian Premier, had given up hope of getting a port and was anxious to
shift the responsibility for giving way on to a tribunal, while the Americans,
who had blocked any other form of tribunal, accepted even this one only
with reluctance. It finally consisted of three Americans, two Canadians,
and one Englishman.
Once the judicial tribunal was accepted the dispute turned on the proper
interpretation of the treaty of 1825. Both sides had a defensible case,
though there seems little doubt that the American case was the better.
The United States won a complete victory. Canada did not gain access to
the sea in the disputed region. But though the result was reasonable
enough the means by which it was reached were more dubious. Neither
in its composition nor in its procedure was the tribunal truly judicial.
Clearly it could only reach a decision if at least one of the members
rejected the case of the government which had appointed him, and the
confidence given by that knowledge was important in securing American
agreement to the tribunal. In the event, the English member. Lord
Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice, voted with the Americans. He main-
tained that he had considered the case on its merits and had reached a
strictly judicial decision. No one, however, either in the United States or
in Canada, believed the same of the American members. Theodore
Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the Presidency when McKinley was
assassinated in 1901, undoubtedly violated the spirit of the agreement in
selecting partisans. None was a ‘jurist of repute’, as the agreement
required — though Elihu Root, then Secretary of War and without judicial
experience, later became a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration
at the Hague — and each had committed himself in public on the subject
before the hearings began. The choice was the more unnecessary because
Roosevelt had stated publicly that he had no intention of accepting an
adverse decision.
In these circumstances the setting up of the tribunal was itself evidence
of American victory. The manner of the triumph was Roosevelt’s. Hay,
gentle and anglophile, would have been content with the maintenance of
the modus vivendi; when the tribunal was set up he recognised that
Roosevelt’s nominations were needlessly offensive. Roosevelt, however,
regarded the American case as unassailable, and saw the tribunal as
merely a means of allowing the British government to escape from an
untenable position, and American agreement to it as a concession. He was
not prepared to risk any compromise in its conclusions, or even to seem to
do so. ‘ Speak softly and carry a big stick ’ was one of Roosevelt’s favourite
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maxims. In the conduct of politics, his failing was not that he carried a
big stick but that he was quite incapable of speaking softly. He was
unable to understand, or even to notice, Canadian resentment of his
action.
Some time before the settlement of the Alaskan boundary, the Hay-
Pauncefote canal treaty had brought to an end the negotiations with
which the Canadians had once tried to connect it. The possibility of
cutting a ship canal through the Central American isthmus had been dis-
cussed for many years, and the control of such a canal accepted as
important. Rivalry between Britain and the United States in Central
America in mid-century had been allayed by the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty
of 1850. This provided that any isthmian canal that might be built should
be jointly controlled, should not be fortified, and should be neutralised for
the benefit of all nations.
After the Civil War, American interest in a ship canal grew, and the
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty came to be seen as a limitation on the United
States. While the arguments for the canal were commercial, there were
opposing interests — railroad interests for example — whose opposition,
together with the technical difficulties of the task, prevented action; but
support for the canal was greatly strengthened by the Spanish-American
War. When war broke out, the American battleship Oregon had to make
the long voyage round Cape Horn in order to reach the Atlantic and take
an effective part. The propagandists of expansion and a big navy were not
slow to point out that a canal would have been of great use in the war in the
Caribbean, and to renew their insistence that it should be built — and not
only built, but built and controlled by the United States.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty stood in the way. There had been attempts
by unscrupulous American politicians to argue that it had lapsed and
could be ignored; but that was not the best American opinion. Though
there was a good deal of talk about the possibility of the United States
abrogating the treaty. Hay and his colleagues were anxious to act with
strict legality. Hay put forward his proposals in December 1898. Lord
Salisbury’s initial response was favourable, and Hay set to work with Sir
Julian Pauncefote, the British ambassador, who was a lawyer by training,
and who had earlier had special experience of a similar problem while
working on the Suez Canal Treaty. Hay and Pauncefote worked fast —
by the middle of January they had produced a draft treaty. The pressure
for change was solely American. The British government were perfectly
satisfied with the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. They saw, moreover, that a
concession to American interest in the matter of a ship canal might well
be worth a concession to Canada elsewhere, and they were aware of the
objections to the building of a canal while an important dispute with the
United States was continuing. Hence their attempts to connect the canal
with the Alaskan boundary question, which delayed the new treaty for a
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year. These attempts were abandoned in the face of American refusal to
consider them, and the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty was signed in
February 1900.
The new treaty modified the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in one respect
only — it withdrew the British claim to a share in the building and main-
tenance of the canal. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty remained in force
except as superseded by the new one. But in spite of the care taken by
both Hay and Pauncefote to modify the earlier treaty as little as possible,
there was no doubt that the United States would be the chief beneficiary.
Since the building of the Suez Canal British interest in the Panama route
to the East, never very great, had declined. Strategically the advantage of
the canal — chiefly the ability to concentrate the Atlantic and Pacific
squadrons of her navy in one ocean at need — would go to the United
States. The British position would not be strengthened by its building but
rather the reverse. Yet for more than a generation it had been accepted
that an isthmian canal would be a great work of civilisation. It was diffi-
cult to oppose, even without the knowledge that continuing opposition
would not be effective unless backed by force. Britain had no intention of
sharing in the building of the canal. Even in support of Canada, she could
not for long decline to give up her right of veto.
The British government therefore accepted the first Hay-Pauncefote
Treaty as drafted; but the American Senate, to which it duly went for
ratification, did not. The Senate criticism took two main lines. The first
was an objection to the clause in the treaty which invited other European
powers to adhere to it. This invitation to help guarantee a treaty effective
in the western hemisphere seemed to many Senators at variance with the
Monroe Doctrine. The more important criticism, however, was that the
existence of a neutralised canal would strengthen as against the United
States any power with a navy larger than hers. Such a power could
effectively blockade the canal, while the United States, though possessing
equal rights, would not be able to prevent larger foreign squadrons from
passing it. The canal, said the naval strategists, would be valuable to the
United States only if it could be fortified.
Senate opposition to the treaty built up during the spring and summer
of 1900. When the Senate adjourned in June it had taken no vote, and
during the summer the Boer War, the American election campaign,
and, above all, the Boxer rising in China and the prolonged negotiations
which followed, diverted attention in both countries from the canal. But
before the Senate reassembled in December, William Jennings Bryan, the
Democratic presidential candidate, had attacked the treaty, making it a
political issue and lining up the Democrats against it. The Senate finally
ratified the treaty with three amendments. The first, though it made
the supersession of the entire Clayton-Bulwer Treaty specific, was of
minor importance. The second and most important added to the clauses
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neutralising the canal another providing that none of these should ‘apply
to measures which the United States may find it necessary to take for
securing by its own forces the defence of the United States . . . The third
struck out the clause inviting other powers to adhere.
The treaty as amended was virtually a rejection of the draft which had
gone to the Senate, and the British government in turn declined to accept
the amended version. Though Hay and Joseph Choate, the American
ambassador in London, did their best to persuade them that the amend-
ments were unimportant, that was simply not true. Hay’s anxiety was
that if the new treaty were not accepted the Senate would abrogate the
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in defiance of international law. When the new
treaty lapsed, however, in March 1901 (since it had not been accepted),
the Senate adjourned at the same time without, in Pauncefote’s words,
‘committing any further enormity’.
The rival drafts of the canal treaty appeared to be irreconcilable.
When Lord Lansdowne, now Foreign Secretary, finally offered his com-
ments on the Senate version, he raised objections which, though familiar,
were important and valid. Nevertheless, there were already signs that
Lansdowne’s real objection was to the manner in which the Senate had
acted, and not to the substance of the amendments. The draft treaty
lapsed; a new one was prepared during the summer of 1901 ; it was signed
on 18 November, and ratified by both countries without difficulty. In that
treaty — the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty — the United States gained
everything for which the opponents of the first version had been con-
tending. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was specifically superseded; the
neutrality of the canal in time of war was not guaranteed; and other
powers were not invited to adhere. Lansdowne abandoned his earlier
objections. In the negotiating of the new treaty the only concession which
he and Pauncefote gained was in ensuring that other powers which were
not signatories were placed by the treaty under exactly the same restric-
tions as Britain. That achieved, they were content that those restrictions
should be administered and enforced by the United States. For their part
most of the naval party in the Senate were not concerned to place Britain
under peculiar disadvantages. The agreement reached reflected the con-
siderable power shift in the Caribbean in the half-century since the
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty had been signed. That fact passed almost un-
noticed and quite unchallenged in Britain.
Both the Alaskan boundary dispute and that over the control of the
isthmian canal were confined to the American continent, and the American
attitude to them was therefore simpler, more vigorous and compounded of
older emotions than it would have been in more distant conflicts. As an
immediate result, the United States determined to treat each negotiation
as separate. The conduct and settlement of one did not affect the other.
Thus the signing of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty did not modify the
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American stand on Alaska. Nor, though the goodwill for Britain
generated by the British attitude to the Spanish-American War was real
and marked, did that influence the outcome of the later negotiations with
Britain. This fragmentation of foreign policy is not peculiar either to the
time or to the United States. It is difficult and not always necessary to
combine diplomatic negotiations into a policy. Nevertheless, the absence
of any attempt to do so was more obvious than usual in American policy
in the i89o’s; and its cause was unshaken confidence in American ability
to control the western hemisphere together with an equal confidence in
American right to do so. These enabled the United States to treat the
most trivial dispute as if a vital interest were involved. They go far to
account for the violence with which American policy was upheld by men
like Olney and Theodore Roosevelt. They largely explain, too, the ten-
dency of these men to cast political issues in legal terms and yet, without
any consciousness of inconsistency, to use political pressure to determine
their outcome.
While American diplomatic activity was concentrated on the western
hemisphere, its limitations were concealed. American confidence in
American strength was in fact justified, but it was not achieved by any
rational calculation. It was rather a sense of security which had developed
unquestioned over seventy years. For a short time Americans were able
to support new ambitions and new theories of world politics while still
adhering to older principles with which the new ones were inconsistent.
Their debate about the terms for the building of the isthmian canal was
essentially a strategic one. Yet American navalists made almost no
attempt to relate their demand for a fortified canal to any larger policy.
Though the demand for a canal implied larger ambitions, those ambitions
were not defined. Since the canal was in the western hemisphere its fortifi-
cation was assumed to be necessary, and justified by the signs of British
opposition. Corresponding inconsistencies can be found in American
political thought. The Darwinian political ideas which influenced Roose-
velt and others, and which undoubtedly exaggerated the violence of their
reactions, logically demanded the expansion of American interests and
influence; an end, indeed, for which Roosevelt worked with his usual
energy. For other Americans, however, hardly less vigorous, the implica-
tions of political Darwinism were blurred by older ideas. As Andrew
Carnegie, the Scots-bom steel king, put it at the time of the Venezuela
crisis, ‘[Great Britain cannot] fairly grudge her race here one continent
when she has liberty to roam over three’.
The Spanish-American War provided the first real test of American
policy. It lasted only a few months, and never engaged any considerable
proportion of American men or resources ; but American motives were of
more importance than its scale would suggest. The war can be regarded
either as a brief aberration, the result of a surge of imperialism which rose
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quickly and as quickly died; or as a major departure, the abandonment of
isolation, the beginning of an involvement in world affairs which was to
continue and grow. There is truth in both views. The United States did
not become on any scale an imperial power in the sense of achieving
formal political control of overseas possessions. The opportunity was
already past and the enthusiasm quickly faded. But there are other forms
of empire. Power produced in due time the desire to use it. After 1898
isolationists could not assume their case.
The Spanish-American War itself had its origin in the growing
American readiness to take charge of the doings of the hemisphere. Its
ostensible cause was the failure of Spain to subdue a persistent rebellion
against her rule in Cuba. Ultimately the United States determined to end
the guerrilla war which was r uinin g the island. Rebellion in Cuba against
Spanish rule had been sporadic throughout the nineteenth century.
Though the mixed population contained a sizeable proportion of Cubans
of Spanish, or largely Spanish, blood the island was ruled by officials sent
out from Spain, and Cuban demands for autonomy were disregarded.
Spanish rule was both inefficient and corrupt, and for both reasons was
prodigally expensive. The most serious rebellion had been the great ten
years war of 1868-78. This was the expression of a demand for reform
rather than for separation from Spain, and it was ended by a convention
in which the desired reforms were promised. But the Spaniards failed to
keep to the spirit of the convention — or even to its letter — and it was that
failure, more than anything else, which led to the outbreak of a new
rebellion in 1895. In the intervening years, the separatists had become
more influential than the autonomists among the Cuban leaders.
Before the American Civil War, many Americans had considered the
purchase or annexation of Cuba. The position of the island in the Carib-
bean gave it a strategic importance, and the value of its tropical crops,
especially sugar, was considerable. But enthusiasm for the acquisition of
Cuba was confined to the South; and — with justice — it was suspected in
the North that the desire to create two new slave states lay behind
Southern zeal. At a time when sectional rivalry dominated American
politics, that suspicion was enough to prevent American action. By 1898,
however, the situation was very different. Slavery had ceased to be a
political issue, and in Cuba as well as on the mainland it had ceased to be
an institution. If the chief motive for annexation had gone, so had the
chief objection to it. Nor was annexation the only possibility, or even the
most attractive one. Many Americans disliked the prospect of a Cuban
colony, for sound republican reasons, and found equally distasteful the
addition of large numbers of citizens of mixed blood. To these men the
right and satisfactory solution was the independence of Cuba.
For the first years of the rebellion the United States maintained a
proper neutrality, but it was formal and official only. President Cleve-
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land’s refusal to intervene was not popular, and with McKinley’s presi-
dency began a steady American progress towards intervention. Even
before American intervention, however, the Spaniards felt that they had
good grounds for complaint. Many Cubans fled to the United States and
there formed groups to collect money, arms and men, and to organise
propaganda against Spain. The activity of these Cuban juntas was well
known, and the Spaniards claimed that the rebellion could not have been
maintained without them. They charged that the American government
was lax in controlling them. This was secondary to a more fundamental
grievance. The Spaniards believed that not even their gun-running was
successful enough to give the insurgents any chance of victory, and that
they were continuing their efforts only in the hope that the United States
would ultimately intervene. A firm statement by the American govern-
ment that the United States would not intervene would have ended that
hope and with it the rebellion. Americans themselves were therefore
largely responsible for the evils of Spanish rule which they hypocritically
denounced.
It is true that American opinion so far favoured the Cuban insurgents
that it would have been difficult for an American president formally to
reject them. But the basis of American sentiment was not merely com-
mercial imperialism. The United States had large investments in Cuba and
imported almost all the sugar which was much the island’s most important
crop. But there was no unanimity among American businessmen about
the importance of Cuba. Only the sugar companies had a direct interest;
and their preferred solution, on the whole, was the restoration of Spanish
authority. As for other businessmen and conservatives, they regarded
Cuba as likely to prove an expensive distraction from the area in which
they wanted to see American government intervention — the Far East.
The impulse for intervention in Cuba came from a very different source.
It derived from the principles and satisfied the emotions summed up in the
term ‘ the Progressive movement Humanitarianism was an essential ele-
ment in this movement, with, as a corollary, distrust of business motives
and distaste for business selfishness. The skill, moreover, with which the
opponents of the Progressives had invoked the Constitution and used the
courts to block reform had bred in the reformers a disregard for the
niceties of law and a readiness to ignore them when that was necessary to
get things done. When the object was good it was pusillanimous to let
legal technicalities stand in the way of its achievement.
To the Progressives reform at home and reform abroad were indivisible.
The same moral impulse was behind the attack on Big Business in the
United States and the attack on Spanish rule in Cuba. But there was an
obvious difference. Business in the United States was all too successful;
the Spanish colonial regime was unsuccessful. Many Americans who
would have accepted without question a stable Spanish regime felt that a
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Spain which could not pacify Cuba had no right to rule. The Spanish
counter-argument, that the United States was largely responsible for
Spanish difficulties, nearly all Americans rejected. They did so because
they believed that Latin races were by nature inefficient, cruel and corrupt
and therefore unfit to rule others. The defects of Spanish rule were
inherent, and no improvement was to be looked for. This sense of racial
superiority was strong in the Progressives, and it often formed the basis of
a coherent philosophy of world politics. When the Boer War broke out, a
surprising number of Progressives, in spite of traditional opposition to
Britain and enthusiasm for the name of republic, believed that in the
interests of civilisation Britain should win. The Cuban war was seen quite
differently. It was a struggle among the barbarous or the decadent,
much more analogous to the Turkish oppression of the Armenians, some-
thing to which the civilised conscience reacted strongly, and which it was
the duty of civilised nations to stop. It follows that the Progressive atti-
tude to the Cubans was ambivalent. A real desire that they should be free
was complicated by the conviction that they needed the supervision of the
United States. By blood and history they were unfit for self-government.
This ambivalence could be concealed while the problem was still that of
ending Spanish misrule. A readiness to believe the worst of the Spaniards
was fed by the New York press which, in the course of a circulation war,
reported, magnified and invented atrocity stories heavily slanted against
Spain. For these reasons, far from discouraging the Cubans, the American
government increased its pressure on Spain after September 1897.
Spanish complaints redoubled; and they were now against American
policy, not against American negligence. The Spaniards were ready to
make concessions, but they regarded them as made to show goodwill, to
deprive the United States of international support and of any excuse for
further interference, and ultimately to force the repudiation of the in-
surgents. The Americans regarded them as steps to autonomy in Cuba or
even the ending of Spanish rule. The gulf could not be bridged.
The situation was aggravated when the American battleship Maine, on
a visit to Havana in February 1898, exploded and sank, a disaster whose
cause has never been satisfactorily determined. Though incidental to the
real questions at issue, the Maine explosion heightened tension in both
countries to such an extent that peace became unlikely. Spain, much the
weaker power, was anxious for peace, but she could not make all the con-
cessions demanded by the United States without real risk of an internal
revolution. Repeated attempts to involve the other powers failed. Though,
with the exception of Britain, they all deplored American policy, they were
essentially indifferent. Their determination to remain neutral meant that
the United States had virtually a free hand, and when that became
apparent, Spain, the last concessions made, declared war.
The war itself was short and its engagements entirely successful to the
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United States. The only important Spanish squadron, that under Admiral
Cervera, was blockaded in Santiago Bay. Although an American attempt
to sink a blockship across the harbour mouth failed, Cervera stayed in
harbour long enough to allow the American expeditionary force to land
unopposed. When that force invested Santiago by land his position
became untenable and he put to sea, only to have his squadron quickly
destroyed in a battle that was essentially a triumph for superior American
gunnery. With the destruction of Cervera’s fleet the surrender of the
Spanish land forces was only a matter of time.
The speed and ease of the American military victory was, however,
surprising. At sea, slight superiority lay with the Americans, but the
Spaniards had almost two hundred thousand men on the island with
which to oppose some fifteen thousand Americans; yet this small force
not only landed unopposed, but was able to reach Santiago in about a
week and fought, when it fought, against greatly inferior Spanish forces.
The inability to concentrate their forces effectively is the chief charge
against the Spanish leaders, since they were neither able nor willing to
wage guerrilla war.
The campaign in Cuba was the centrepiece of the war, and indeed the
only campaign that followed logically from the long debate that had pre-
ceded the war. But attention was diverted from it and the whole scope
of the war extended by the exploits of Commodore Dewey at Manila.
Dewey commanded the American Asiatic squadron. No sooner was war
declared than he set out for the Philippines and, entering Manila Bay,
completely destroyed the Spanish fleet. His was the first, the most com-
plete and the most spectacular victory of the war. It raised a problem
which, plainly, few Americans had considered before the war began — that
of the future of the Philippines. The aroused martial pride of the Ameri-
cans and the completeness of their victory made the return of the islands
to Spain at the war’s end impossible. By the terms of the peace treaty,
signed at Paris on io December 1898, Spain withdrew from Cuba, and
ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States; she also ceded the
Philippines, for whose loss she was paid twenty million dollars.
There was no serious objection to this transfer from the other powers.
The Far East, unlike the Caribbean, was an area in which they took a keen
interest. The fate of the Philippines exercised them all. Spain as the ruler
of the islands was inoffensive, too weak to do more than maintain herself
and that not very effectively. The prospect of American intervention in the
Far East was much more disturbing. Nevertheless, if the islands could not
be returned to Spain their retention by the United States was the generally
preferred alternative. Right of conquest was difficult to challenge, and
international rivalry was keen enough to make their transfer to other
hands unacceptable. This attitude also indicated the general belief that the
United States would not make effective use of her new acquisition. Those
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observers who foresaw American activity did so usually because they
expected co-operation between the United States and Britain; and most
were well aware of the difficulties in the way of that.
So far as the Philippines were concerned, this international judgement
was proved right. Hardly was the war over than enthusiasm for empire
began to weaken in the United States. Its implications were brought home
to Americans by an insurrection against their rule in the Philippines which
took three years to put down and was much more costly than the war with
Spain. But it was not merely the cost of pacifying and administering the
Philippines which raised doubts. Many reformers who had been eager to
free Cuba from Spain objected, for obvious reasons, to subjugating the
Philippines themselves. William Jennings Bryan, the great western Popu-
list leader who still dominated the Democratic party, was one such. Most
Progressives, on the other hand, accepted American imperialism without
a qualm. The fitness of their race to rule was beyond question. Of that the
vigour of their individualism in domestic politics was one sure indicator.
It would be merely inconsistent to decline the responsibilities of power
abroad. American reformers were faced with the dilemma which foreign
policy has always presented to radicals. The near-unanimity which they
had shown on the Cuban question began to break down.
Both in the United States and among the other powers, however,
interest in the Philippines was primarily a reflection of interest in China,
then temporarily the centre of international rivalry. The object of the
rivalry was commerce. China traders had long been trying to gain readier
access to the interior, and had been demanding government intervention
to overcome the obstructiveness of Chinese officials, in Peking and in the
provinces. In the later 1890’s, for various reasons, their desires briefly
found wider support. The importance of the Chinese market for the future
was much exaggerated. A new form of competition, for railway conces-
sions, was added to the familiar competition in the sale of consumer goods.
Railway concessions were by their nature exclusive; railway building was
financed by loans to the Chinese government; both the concessions and
the loans could be used to increase the political influence which had been
necessary to negotiate them. The Sino-Japanese war had called attention
to the weakness of China, seemingly ripe for dissolution. Above all, the
rapid advance of Russia towards the control of north China, control
whose object was not commercial but political, led many to fear that the
dissolution had begun. The situation was one to which the apostles of race
competition reacted strongly.
Americans shared these general anxieties. Their interest in China was of
long standing, and united very various groups. China traders, like their
European competitors, had long wanted more government support. But
in the 1890’s their special interest seemed less special. American business-
men came to be haunted by the problem of over-production. A sudden
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THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
export surplus which developed very quickly between 1893 and 1898
argued not only an impressive volume of production but a satiated home
market. If the United States produced more than she could consume
disaster, it was believed, could be avoided only by finding new export
markets. For different reasons, Europe, the British empire, Africa, even
South America, all seemed to offer little hope. Only China remained, and
to American businessmen as to Europeans it came to have an importance
beyond the reality of the trade involved.
The businessmen with an interest in China were not, on the whole,
imperialists. What evidence there is suggests that in general they opposed
the Spanish-American War. Apart from its cost, they thought that it
would divert energies better spent in fostering the China trade. But when,
ironically, the result of the war was the taking of the Philippines, they
realised how valuable the islands could be to their cause, and redoubled
their propaganda. They could see, and were prepared to help others to see,
the connection between the Philippines and China.
In this they found allies among the expansionists, who claimed a theo-
retical interest in trade with the East. Competition in trade was one form
of the competition in which nations inevitably engaged. The need to
defend trade routes across the Pacific had been used as one argument for
the building of a large navy, the acquisition of Hawaii, the control of the
isthmian canal. China policy, moreover, since there was no question of
any annexation, did not place the same strain on American radicals as
had the taking of the Philippines. The protection of China and freedom of
commerce against the predatory powers was — even to men who distrusted
Big Business at home — unquestionably ethical. Finally, American mis-
sionaries in China were many, their dismay at political developments there
was growing, and their influence at home was considerable.
From these various groups, then, the pressure on the government to
take action in China increased; but before the Spanish-American War
it was entirely unsuccessful. President Cleveland was unsympathetic.
After McKinley’s election the war diverted attention from China; and
McKinley’s first Secretary of State, John Sherman, was ineffective. When
in March 1898 the British ambassador asked McKinley informally
whether the two countries could co-operate in the Far East, the answer was
a courteous rebuff. The United States, said McKinley, had a well-defined
tradition of declining joint action. The British approach was ill timed at
the height of the Cuban crisis, but there is no hint of any change in
American policy. In John Hay, however, who became Secretary of State
in 1898, the China lobby found a spokesman more to their liking. At the
end of the war they hoped for a more active policy.
The alliance between China traders and expansionists was not effective.
The belief that American trade would quickly expand from its base in the
Philippines, with Manila as the American Hong Kong, proved illusory.
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Before the building of the Panama Canal most American goods had to be
protected by a preferential tariff even in the Philippines themselves. Yet as
a commercial base the Philippines were doubtless of some value. Un-
fortunately the problem in China was political, not commercial; it was
essentially that of bringing effective pressure to bear on the Chinese
government in opposition to the pressure of other powers. That the
United States, even under Theodore Roosevelt, was not prepared to do.
In spite of his efforts and those of propagandists for the navy, the United
States did not have an effective base in the Philippines. As late as 1902
Congress had not been persuaded to vote the money for defence and
facilities. There was, however, a more fundamental weakness in American
policy in the Far East. Even with a more effective base it would have had
to be conducted under great disadvantages of distance. Only Japan and
Russia among the powers did not share these disadvantages. Effective
opposition to either — though Russia was then the chief offender —
required co-operation among the others. The American tradition of isola-
tion was still too strong to be broken. Moreover, rivalries in China were
too closely interwoven with European rivalries to be treated as a thing
apart. Involvement in China meant involvement in Europe, and that the
United States was not yet prepared to face.
For these reasons, American retention of the Philippines was of small
moment in the politics of the Far East. Only the British had seriously
hoped for more, welcoming the possibility of support in checking Russian
ambitions. Meanwhile, however, the British had taken the port of
Weihaiwei, held by the Japanese since the Sino-Japanese War, and had
lent the Chinese the money to pay the Japanese indemnity for which it was
the security. Salisbury decided on this move reluctantly, considering that
he must do something to counterbalance the recent German acquisition of
Kiao-chow; but the taking of Weihaiwei seemed to Americans to indicate
that Britain had given up hope of maintaining the ‘open door’ — the
policy of equal rights for all powers throughout the whole of China.
American suspicions were reinforced by the speeches of British statesmen
later in 1898, and still further by the so-called Scott-Muraviev Convention
of 1899, in which Britain undertook to seek no railway concessions north
of the Great Wall in return for a similar Russian undertaking south of it.
The limit placed on Russian advance southwards was welcome enough,
but it looked certain to lead to the division of China into ‘spheres of
influence’ for trade as well. American interests were concentrated in
north China, where Russian pretensions were most threatening. The occa-
sional British resort of obtaining counter-concessions farther south to
offset a Russian gain was not open to the United States. It was essential to
American interests that the powers refrain from demanding new privileges.
John Hay’s first attempt to achieve this was his famous ‘open door’
note. On 6 September 1899 he sent virtually identic notes to Russia,
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THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
Great Britain and Germany, the powers most immediately concerned, and
followed them in November with similar notes to France, Italy and Japan.
These were essentially an invitation to the powers to rest content with
their existing treaties, and to agree that subjects of all the powers should
be equally treated throughout China. The proposal was received with
mixed feelings, but all the powers accepted it — on the condition that it was
also accepted by the others. Though the Russian reply was so equivocal
as to constitute a virtual rejection, Hay contrived to express himself as
satisfied. The history of the writing of the note makes it clear that it was
chiefly directed against Russian expansion in north China. The Russians
were reluctant to subscribe because they realised that ; but their decision
to do so did not indicate that they intended to modify their policy. It is
doubtful whether a policy so essentially negative as that put forward in the
note could ever have been imposed on the powers. What is certain is that
it could not be imposed by a circular note. The note was clearly an appeal
to international public opinion, a device to get the powers to commit
themselves in public. In the circumstances it was an admission that the
United States would not use force in opposing Russia. There was a logical
connection between the self-denying policy which Hay advocated and the
means which he chose to support it. Both lacked vigour.
The failure of the ‘open door’ note was concealed for a time by the
outbreak of the Boxer rebellion, three months after Hay announced his
acceptance of the European replies on 20 March 1900. Chaos in China
produced a situation so out of the ordinary that no power could object to
any step that another might take to protect its nationals. Those powers
with expansive intentions and those without agreed for different reasons
that it was immediately important to damp down the crisis. In this situa-
tion the United States played the expected part. Hay’s first reaction was
to instruct the U.S. minister in China to confine himself to the indepen-
dent protection of American citizens. When it became clear how serious the
position was. Hay was willing to approve joint action. He announced his
policy in another circular note, in which he took the opportunity to repeat
that American policy was still to preserve the integrity of China and ‘ the
principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts’ of the empire.
Though this note has often been taken to initiate a new and more active
American policy in China, or even a determination to defend Chinese
territorial and administrative entity, in fact American policy stayed as
cautious as before. Temporarily, during the Boxer crisis, it looked effec-
tive, because all the powers — except perhaps Germany — were prepared,
temporarily, to be moderate, whether in order to end the negotiations and
so free their hands or in order to strengthen the Chinese government. The
concert of the powers and the integrity of China were seen to go together.
While the powers were anxious to maintain the first they were ready to
accept the second.
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Their agreement concealed fundamental differences among them and
also the weakness of American policy. Only under some such stress,
however, could the United States act in concert with other powers, even in
defence of her own interests. As Hay remarked on 23 June 1900, ‘any-
thing we should now do in China to take care of our imperilled interests,
would be set down to “subservience to Great Britain”. France is Russia’s
harlot — to her own grievous damage. Germany we could probably get on
our side by sufficient concessions and perhaps with England, Germany
and Japan we might manage to save our skins. But such a proceeding
would make all our fools throw fits in the market place — and the fools are
numerous.’ The advance of Russia continued till it was ended by the
Russo-Japanese War, when the attention of the European powers returned
to Europe, and when the dominance of Japan proved as unwelcome to the
United States as that of Russia had been.
The pattern of American policy in the forty years following the Civil
War is thus one of growing domination of the western hemisphere
together with a continuing reluctance to act outside it. These geographical
limits set to American policy did not, however, imply any lack of confi-
dence. Rather they made it possible to maintain the larger confidence
which had been bred in isolation. American policy was limited by a dis-
trust of international relations somewhat analogous to the Jeffersonian
distrust of government. It derived from American theory and not from
diffidence, and was quite compatible with an enlarged sense of dignity and
an exaggerated sensitivity to affront. Americans could therefore still
retain old notions of the nature of foreign policy which could not —
durable though they have undoubtedly proved — survive the test of prac-
tice. Their sense of power was the greater because they never explored its
limits. They began to develop larger ambitions, but not yet the will to
realise them. It is ironical that the Spanish-American War, which did so
much for Roosevelt’s reputation, did so little to establish the ideas he
advocated. Yet in the last analysis the limited, provincial outlook which
so annoyed Roosevelt was sound enough. A world policy is not devised
because it is something that a great power must have — it develops
naturally from national needs and interests. Lacking that basis, American
zeal for expansion quickly faded.
In short, the diplomatic relations of the United States with Europe
during these years were still marginal. American potential was well
recognised, by Americans and others, but so, equally, was American
reluctance to engage in world affairs. It would take a great deal to make
the United States put forth her strength outside the Americas. But not
all the relations between the United States and Europe were diplomatic.
The United States had never consistently aimed at economic self-suffi-
ciency, and her co mm ercial links with the rest of the world continued to
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THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
grow. Though she was still a debtor nation — a position not altered till the
first World War — the title was already a misleading one, for the balance
of payments was moving in her favour. Foreign investment was increas-
ingly no more than reinvestment. Moreover, American trade was coming
to be more important to the countries of Europe than it was to the United
States, a fact evident, and diplomatically important, at the time of the
Spanish-American War. The reluctance of the continental powers — and
of Britain — to place trade and investment in jeopardy by supporting
Spain against the United States was one reason for the speed with which
agreement on neutrality was reached.
Another link, unique in strength and importance, joined the United
States to Europe as no European country was joined to another — that of
immigration. From the beginning most immigrants inevitably came,
whether freely or perforce, as individuals, removed from the society in
which they had had a place. In spite of that, the first settlers quickly
recreated a social environment as nearly what they had known as a new
land, empty of their kind, would allow. Before long their successors found
a society perhaps less rigid than the one they had left, but both cohesive
and familiar. This was the society of the eastern seaboard. When a solid
base of population was established and settlers moved westward, they met
physical conditions unknown in western Europe. They adapted ; and the
passage of time during which their interests were in the exploitation of the
West did more to make Americans different than merely crossing the
Atlantic had done. Newcomers now found a society individual, confident,
and with conventions of its own. This change was completed even while
much of the West was still empty. By the end of the Civil War the United
States was a strange land, and those who came to it found themselves
strangers. They came, however, in unprecedented numbers. For the first
time the interplay of immigrant and native Americans became more
important than that of man and environment.
The history of American immigration remained, as it had always been,
essentially that of emigration from Europe. Long before the Civil War,
with the abolition of the slave trade, Negro immigration had virtually
ceased. From about 1854 onwards there was substantial immigration
from China. It reachedits peak of 40,000 in 1882, but in no other year did
it exceed 25,000 and a more typical figure would be 5000 or 10,000 a year.
Chinese immigration quickly roused opposition, and it was, in any event,
almost confined to the West Coast. Numerically more important was
immigration from Canada. The numbers fluctuated widely, touching
1 25,000 in 1 88 1 but usually very much lower, and falling almost to nothing
after 1885, not to recover for twenty years. But immigration from Canada
was immigration from Europe at one remove. The Canadians who crossed
the border were Europeans at some stage in the process of becoming
American, if they had not become American already. These figures con-
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
trast sharply with those for immigration from Europe. They too fluctu-
ated widely, for a variety of reasons, some European and some American,
but after 1865 they never fell below 101,000 — in 1878 when immigration
from Canada was no more than 26,000; and they rose to 974,000 in
1905 — the year in which total immigration first reached more than a
million — with an intermediate peak of 648,000 in 1882.
As significant as the rise in the number of immigrants were the changes
in their nationality. As late as 1 865, Britain and Germany provided the
great majority of immigrants. The numbers from eastern and southern
Europe were still insignificant. But it was those regions which accounted
for nearly all the increase in immigration towards the end of the century.
The figures are given in the following table:
Immigrants by country of origin (in ooo’s)
Dtal
(Europe)
reat
Britain
1
IS
a
1
.9
•0
Other N.W.
Europe*
r
0
T 3
1
*0
ustria-
Hungary
.3
V >
3
ther
E. Europe’
Italy
ther
S. Europe"
H
O
H
t-H
0
a
<
ai
O
O
1865
214
82
30
7
8
83
< 1
< 1
< 1
< 01
1
1
1870
329
104
57
31
9
us
< 1
4
1
< 01
3
1
1875
183
48
38
14
12
48
1
8
8
< 01
4
3
1880
349
73
72
66
15
85
2
17
5
< 0-1
12
2
1885
353
58
52
41
14
124
3
27
17
1
14
3
1890
446
70
53
50
21
92
11
56
36
< 1
52
4
1895
250
29
46
27
7
32
< 1
33
36
< 1
35
3
1900
425
13
36
31
6
19
•
US
91
7
100
8
1905
974
84
53
61
25
41
•
276
185
II
221
18
♦ ‘Other N.W. Europe’ includes Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and
Switzerland; ‘Other Eastern Europe’ includes Roumania, Bulgaria and Turkey in Europe;
‘Other Southern Europe’ includes Spain, Portugal, Greece and other Europe not elsewhere
classified. The blank years for Poland are due to the fact that between 1899 and 1918 the
American immigration authorities listed Poles under Russia, Germany or Austria-Hungaiy.
Poles made up a high proportion of the enlarged numbers from Austria-Hungary and
Russia at the end of the century, an influx which continued till the outbreak of the First
World War. The figures are condensed from Historical Statistics of the United States,
Colonial Times to 1957 (U.S. Bureau of the Census), q.v. for their original source.
With certain exceptions the basic tradition of the United States had
always been that of welcoming immigrants. In an empty land they were
needed both for progress and for security. But they were not welcomed
merely because labour was scarce — they were welcomed as participants in
an experiment. The United States early became a peculiarly self-conscious
nation, the embodiment of a political theory. This was a country whose
natural endowments made possible the deliberate creation of a new and
better society, which would in turn breed new and better men. Such a
country attracted the vigorous and adventurous; it attracted many who
were looking for fortune; but it also attracted political idealists. This
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THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
attraction was, of course, necessary if the ideal were to be realised; but
the ideal provided standards by which immigrants could be judged.
Xenophobia was latent in it, for European corruption could all too easily
enter with Europeans. Three main strands can be isolated in American
nativism — three strands which formed a complex pattern, which were
variously important at various times, but which were always there. The
first was anti-catholicism, itself a complex of emotions surrounding the
suspicion that Catholics were both disloyal and depraved. Paradoxically
the second was anti-radicalism, all the stronger because the nation had its
origin in the most conservative of revolutions. The French Revolution left
its mark on Americans. It became a source of pride to them that their
revolution had not gone too far, and they saw European radicalism as a
greater danger than reaction. The third was acceptance of the Anglo-
Saxon or Teutonic origins of the United States. It should be remembered
with what reluctance the American revolutionaries had extended their
demands from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of man. The tendency
to look back to English liberties as the origin of their own remained,
defining the American vision rather than limiting it, but inducing a certain
suspicion of other stocks.
These attitudes remained latent except when brought out by difficulties
within the United States itself. Both because of their numbers and
because of their origins the newcomers posed a new problem. Like the
Irish before them, Italians or Slavs or East European Jews were more
difficult to assimilate because differences of religion and culture were
greater; and they also shared the language difficulties familiar to Germans
or Scandinavians. Their numbers meant that, even more than earlier
immigrants, they settled in groups and clung to their own customs. The
growth of large racial ghettos in the major cities made local government
much more difficult, and complicated state and national government also.
But these difficulties, though real, merely intensified strains whose essential
cause was domestic, the development of an industrial society on a scale
and at a speed hitherto unknown. The United States could still absorb a
great deal of labour — that was the essence of the opportunity — but she
was beginning to meet the European problems from which free land,
large resources and political democracy had been enough to exempt her
till then. Laissez-faire was under attack. This was the period of the
protest movements which culminated in the Populist revolt. Domestic
tensions determined the American attitude to the foreigner, and immigra-
tion became an issue in what was essentially a domestic debate.
When it turned to immigration, the debate was no straightforward
affair of pro and con. The flow of immigrants was welcomed — and
indeed often arranged and subsidised — by those who had lands to dispose
of or mines to work, but it was increasingly resented by working men.
Immigrants worked for less than the native bom; they could be more
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MATERIAL PROGRESS AND WORLD-WIDE PROBLEMS
easily intimidated and managed, and they threatened the benefits which
American working men had gained or were trying to gain. The lines,
however, were not simply drawn between native bom and immigrants.
Too many of the most active trade unionists were themselves immigrants.
In their efforts to limit later immigration they drew a distinction between
those who came under contract to an employer — who alone were deplor-
able — and those who came independently. For the opponents of labour
the issue was no simpler. Immigrants might be welcomed as a docile
labour force, or feared as likely dupes of the radical agitators who might
easily be among them, as at best fodder for political bosses. Not all
conservatives were large employers or their allies. Those reformers who
wanted to return to the individualism of an earlier America were hostile
equally to Big Business and regimented labour. The economic arguments
gained or lost in force with the state of the economy, but they were
complicated by a nativism which had other sources. Even in the United
States racialists began to debate the likely effects of so large an influx of
strange stocks.
The doubts and difficulties must not be exaggerated. It is a tribute both
to American resources and to the generosity of the American tradition
that there was no effective check on European immigration till after the
first World War, though Congress recognised some responsibility for
controlling it in 1882. There was no crisis of American confidence.
Indeed, the famous lines placed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in
1886-
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled millions yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. . .
show a proud certainty that the United States could make something of
a mass of unpromising material — not a certainty which the Founding
Fathers would have shared. This did not mean that Americans thought of
America primarily as a refuge. The idea of America as an example
remained dominant; and social Darwinism itself could be adapted to
inclusive or exclusive purposes. But common to all the arguments was a
growing realisation that the United States was an established society, and
that the fitting of large numbers of immigrants into it was a large and
difficult task. Opinion differed as to just how difficult the task was, and
whether its dangers or its rewards were greater.
None of this seriously weakened the belief of Americans in their
national mission, but the belief of Europeans was less robust. Throughout
its existence the United States had claimed to be in the van of progress,
and the claim had been generally allowed. Whether observers foresaw the
American future with enthusiasm or with dismay, they agreed that here
was something new and significant. The Civil War itself, however vari-
ously interpreted, did nothing to shake that agreement. But the claim to
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THE UNITED STATES AND THE OLD WORLD
leadership was one that could be made inoffensively only by a small
nation, and safely only by a nation remote as well as small. As the power
of the United States grew, as her trade expanded, as communications
developed, her weight in the international scale became more important
than her political example. To Europeans she seemed to behave increas-
ingly like other powers.
Equally important, with the passage of time the United States, once the
beacon of radicals, became a conservative country. First in achieving
political democracy, she lagged in social reform. By 1890 American
industrial legislation was behind that of western European countries.
British employers increasingly complained that their American rivals had
an unfair advantage from the absence of effective trade unions in America ;
British working men no longer thought a move to America the easiest
way of bettering themselves. It would be difficult to show that the new
immigrants were always poorer than their predecessors. Most immigrants
had always been poor; if the demand of American industry for cheap
labour and the active search of shipping lines for steerage passengers made
movement possible for completely new groups, it is also likely that they
were induced to come, rather than forced to go by positive hardship in
eastern Europe. Nevertheless, poverty was a more important motive for
emigration than before — more important because other motives, enter-
prise or political idealism, were now lacking.
For these reasons European observers looked with less interest at the
United States. The skill with which the Constitution has been interpreted
during the past fifty years to meet the needs of a changing society was not
yet developed; nor would it then have impressed non-Americans if it had
been. European reformers had once seen the United States as a land
where prosperity naturally followed from sound political institutions;
they now saw a land where only large resources made antiquated institu-
tions tolerable. With political dominance and incomparable wealth still in
the future, the United States entered the twentieth century diminished
from a great experiment to a power among the powers.
693
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